How did people run packs before e-mail? For that matter, how did they do it before text messages, cell phones, the internet, and social media?

Case in point: a few days ago I got an e-mail (on my phone) from one of our Den Leaders. It said “I think the Tiger Picnic is scheduled for the same day as the Elementary School’s Carnival Night”. So I looked up the number for the school office (on the internet via my phone) and gave them a call. After confirming that they were indeed scheduled for the same night, I looked at the pack calendar (still on my phone) and figured a week later was Memorial Day weekend so that was out. But a week earlier didn’t seem to have any conflicts.

So I called my Assistant Cubmaster (who was responsible for reserving the city park where we are having the picnic) and left him a voicemail saying that we were changing the date by a week. A couple of minutes later I got a text message from him that he got my message while he was at the city desk filling out the paperwork to reserve the park. Just in the nick of time!

So long story (sort of) short, all this wonderful technology helped fix a pack problem within minutes all while I was driving down the highway at 80 miles an hour. No, not really. I was in the lab at work. But imagine how much more problematic that would have been without these technologies.

25 years ago today the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch. All seven crew members of STS-51-L were lost in the accident.

At a memorial service three days later at Johnson Space Center, President Reagan said:

Sometimes, when we reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain.

All of us have times in our lives when we fall short. They are not all national tragedies, but there are times when we must pick up and try again. As Scouts work their way through the ranks there are many times when things don’t go as planned, are harder than anticipated, or just get off track.

One of the Core Values of Cub Scouting is perseverance, sticking with something and not giving up even if it is difficult. This could be something like not giving up on the Pinewood Derby because they didn’t win the first year, or the shy kid participating in their first skit at the Pack campout.

A parent’s first instinct is often to protect their son from the situation, and rightly so. There is a reason why Tigers have adult partners that help guide them through the first year scouting activities. But as the years progress they need to be given an increasing amount of leeway to try things their way. As they cross over to Boy Scouts they should be a lot further developed in dealing with difficulties as they arise. As I see it, our job as Cub Scout leaders is twofold: first, provide a fun and safe environment where missteps aren’t going to have permanent consequences and second, help the parents ease back a step or two each year as they work their way through the Cub Scout program.

Once they cross over to Boy Scouts this phenomenon doesn’t go away. Scoutmaster Jerry has a post up this week about dealing with the worries about cold weather camping. Not from the scouts, but from their parents. (Spoiler Alert: it comes down to training and trust)

A time lapse video of the shuttle Discovery being prepared for launch

More about the making of the video here.

In order to celebrate my birthday tomorrow DARPA is offering a $40,000 prize to the first person or group of people that can find 10 red balloons. DARPA, aka the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is not just looking for any ten red balloons, but ten specific red weather balloons they have positioned around the United States. They are calling it the DARPA Network Challenge to hide the real reason for the contest, because the “Arlen is so awesome we want to give away money to celebrate” was too obvious.

10 99 Luftballons

So there you go, 10 AM tomorrow go win $40,000 for my birthday.

Find the location of these 10. I doubt they will be this close together.

OK, so it isn’t really for my birthday, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the internet. More specifically the ARAPANET, the internet’s predecessor.

To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is hosting the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

Still, it is a good reason to use lots of things DARPA has helped develop: GPS, the internet, maybe some robot minions, or even a Predator if you have one to help with the search, which would be way cooler than the social networks other groups are using.

Spinal Tap Engineering.

Today’s XKCD made me laugh out loud. Some problems are marketing and sales problems, not engineering problems.

Spinal Tap Engineering (Click to see original)

Units of measure are sooooo unnecessary.

For the Thanksgiving feast this year I was responsible for the turkey, so I had the opportunity to brine a turkey again.

Turkey. Representative of typical results.

This is where we start to run in to problems with the assumption that osmotic pressure is the mechanism behind turkey brining. We know from the brine recipe that there is about 1/2 cup of salt per gallon of water, which results in a 1.12 M solution. For comparison, physiological saline (0.9% NaCl) has a molarity of 0.156 M. If we assume turkeys have the same salt concentration as people, that leaves a difference between the brine and the turkey meat of 0.964 M. The big problem here is the direction of the offset. The higher concentration is in the brine, not the turkey meat. The pressure is in the wrong direction to force more H₂0 into the meat.

It turns out I’m not the first to ponder this question, and there is an alternate hypothesis.

The real answer has to do with the shape of proteins. In their natural state, the muscle cells are tightly bound within their protein sheaths—this doesn’t leave much room for excess water to collect in the meat.

But as anyone who has ever made sausages or cured meats knows, salt has a powerful effect on muscles. A 6% solution of salt will effectively denature (read: unravel) the proteins that make up the sheath around the muscle bundles. In this loosened, denatured state, you can now fit more water into those muscles than in their natural state. Even better, the denatured proteins in the sheaths contract far less as they cook, therefore squeezing out much less moisture.

So it turns out that denaturing proteins has a much bigger role in the effect of brining turkey than osmotic pressure.

I don’t think the knowledge will help you make a better turkey next year, but if you need something new to talk about at the Thanksgiving table, it might due the trick. If the guests fall asleep you can always blame the tryptophan.

One of my favorite places on the internet is a photo blog hosted by the Boston Globe called The Big Picture. Each post is a set of related images, usually something timely, often high resolution, and always breathtaking. Yesterday the collection was a series of images from Cassini, the probe we currently have orbiting Saturn. As always, the pictures are mind blowing.

Here’s one example (click for the big version on The Big Picture):

Jagged looking shadows stretch away from vertical structures of ring material created by the moon Daphnis, a bright dot (8 km, or 5 mi across) casting a thin shadow just to the left of the center of the image. The moon has an inclined orbit, and its gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles of the A ring forming the Keeler Gap’s edge and sculpting the edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and out-of-plane components. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn’s equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 26, 2009, at a distance of approximately 823,000 km (511,000 mi) from Daphnis.

Here’s another one showing gravitational influences of two of the moons (click to see bigger and as an animated GIF on The Big Picture):

This animated series of images of Saturn’s F Ring was acquired by Cassini on June 10, 2009. Shepherd moons Prometheus (inner) and Pandora (outer) pass by, alternately smoothing and disturbing the particles that make up the ring. Kinks, knots, wakes and disturbances are apparent in the thin ring as it rotates.

Uranium ore for sale on Amazon. Stock up for the winter! Now I just need that processing plant.

Great Product, Poor Packaging
I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.

Great Product but not sold complete
This is a great product but for any serious application, you must also buy this :Oxo Good Grips Salad Spinner
This is so you can centrifuge it and increase its applications.
Good luck!

So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.
I bought this to power a home-made submarine that I use to look for prehistoric-era life forms in land-locked lakes around my home town in Alaska. At first I wasn’t sure if this item would (or could) arrive via mail, but I was glad to see it showed up with no problems. Well, almost no problems.

Unfortuantly my mom opened my mail, because she does not respect people’s privacy. She was pretty upset to see Uranium Ore. After a long argument and me running away from home again, she finaly stopped being such an idiot and I was able to get back to work.

The quality of this Uranium is on par with the stuff I was bying from the Libyans over at the mall parking lot, but at half the price! I just hope the seller does not run out, because I have many projects on my list including a night vision sasquatch radar, an electromagnetic chupakabra cage, a high velocity, aerial, weighted Mothman net and super heated, instant grill cheese sandwhich maker.

If you get bored reading the reviews for the ore, you can check out the Bic pen reviews…

Interesting plot of caffeine vs. calories showed up in my RSS feed. A large mocha frappucino is the same calories as a big mac? Wow. Give me my Americano any day.

Caffeine vs. Calories (click image for full size at source)

Source

A little bit of applied mathematics for your next “number of M&M’s in the jar” contest.

From Make