A lack of sleep means a loss of focus.

A lack of food means a short temper.

A lack of touch means impaired learning.

A lack of water means hallucinations.

A lack of sex means a strained relationship.

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Fulfill the physical and the mental follows; like a puppy panting in the desert, it comes.    The crude supplies the foundation for the fine.    The biological drives the logical.   Our art is propped upon piles of vegetables, feces, and pillows.   Technology is powered by the passion excreted by a thousand sweaty bodies, humping and gasping,  filled with water and steak and wine.

—

I am amazed at the ways in which our physical state affects our mental.

I am also abhorred by the same fact.

When will we break free?

And…what do we do in the meantime?

This past weekend my family joined my father, my stepmother, her kids and significant others, and my sister in a fun weekend camping, sightseeing, and biking along the Root River Trail in southeast Minnesota.     Some people camped out at The Old Barn Resort a few miles out of Preston, MN, and some of us stayed at The Trail Head Inn inside Preston.     Minus the cost of the hotel room (OMG!) and the fact that our bed sheets were covered in hair and semen stains (before we arrived, thank you very much), it was a good time to be had by all.    My father cooked his famous meals over the campfire, we did some biking, poking around in Preston and Lanesboro and other towns, and generally unplugged a bit.

One of the big negatives was that Verizon appeared to be the only cellphone provider with any service up there, so my wife’s iWireless phone and my AT&T-powered iPhone were almost useless the entire time, making it incredibly hard to communicate between folks, so a lot of the time we did things by ourselves.   But on the whole that wasn’t bad, either, as it gave us time to go our own paces.

One afternoon, after riding 9.5 miles with my wife and kiddo, while they took a nap I took off for more trail riding and ended up doing about 16.5 miles along the trail going from Preston to Harmony.    I decided to take a video as I was riding to share with you the experience of it:

In short, a good weekend to unplug a bit and spend some time with family.    If you have the inclination to bike and are ever in southeastern Minnesota, I highly recommend the trails; they are all paved, the small towns are pretty and cute and full of shops, the people are uber-friendly, and the lack of technology might frustrate you but it will definitely encourage you to do something else with your time.

We can put a man on the moon but we can’t figure out a foolproof way to contain backsplash?

You can now buy spray cheese in a can and strawberry edible underwear but if you’re not a graduate student in fluid dynamics you end up with sprinkled shoes?

The urinal has some serious issues, people.

The good old design that has carried us forward from the days of cavemen shooting it down a cracked rock is just not cutting the mustard anymore.   I realize that tradition says a lot — who doesn’t love those adorable porcelain hairwashers all hanging in a row, looking like so many faceless golems with their mouths agape, awaiting the spring rains?   In middle school they were our targets as we frogstepped backwards and attempted to best our pals’ records.  The college gals living on a previously-men’s floor found them to be great planters and grew some mighty philodendrons.   They’ve certainly seen their days of glory.

I am not suggesting, mind you, that we revert; even if you’ve never lined up at the 20′ Stainless-Steel Trough of Hell in a sports stadium, you can just imagine how pleasant that experience is to the participants.    Let’s keep in mind that function is king but form is definitely a close second.

I mean, good lord — a TUBE would be a better choice, eh?   A funnel?   Something that gently cradles the stream in and gradually alters the course towards the drain?   Anything better than that sharp, harsh backdrop.   Approaching this and attempting not to get anything on you is akin to trying to fire a gun at a brick wall and dodging the rebound.     This is not good technology, people.

Technology has provided us with toilet seats that pre-warm themselves, low-flush solutions, and if you’re really daring, self-mulching bogs for those of you who like to self-fertilize your own roses.

How has the urinal been left behind in development?

Who did we piss off?

Or on?

Let’s talk about quarks, shall we?

No, not the guy with the big ears from Star Trek, either — quarks, as in the really, really tiny particles that make up things like electrons, neutrons, and protons.    Did you know that?   Each of those things are made up of a lot smaller things called, “quarks”.   Now you know; go tell your mommy.

Here’s the really Fun Fact™ for today that I wanted to share with you, though, about quarks.   If you don’t think anything is amazing in the world, get this one:

Quarks always exist in pairs (at least) — a regular quark and an anti-quark.    The “anti” partner is exactly the same as the quark, just an opposite charge, so kind of like how you have yin and yang, right?    This partner arrangement is called a, “hadron”.   A hadron’s quarks are always stuck together like that couple in high school that moved as single unit and used up the four minutes of passing time between every class to exchange oral flora.   A quark pair is held together with a sort of stringy stuff/force called, “gluons”.     (The physicist who thought up that one was freaking sharp.) It takes a whole heaping lot of force to even try to pull them apart.

However, if you beef up and try to separate a pair of quarks, which you can only do in experimental arenas like particle accelerators, a funny thing happens.      The gluons stretch, forming stringy “tubes” between the quarks, somewhat like a rubber band.     If you could actually see it (nobody has), it might look something like this:

But a funny thing happens when you get the quarks too far apart and you push them even further away from each other.     Instead of the gluon tube breaking and letting the quarks fly free, the tube splits in the center and a new quark-antiquark pair appears at the ends of the split out of absolutely nothing.

Did you read that?   The new pair of particles appears out of thin air.    Actually, it’s not even air, it’s a complete vacuum. There’s nothing around them as far as we know, yet these two particles “BOING!” into existence.     It might look something like this:

If you are really being destructive, you can keep trying to break them apart and you end up with a generational photo like this next one.   It creates what is called a, “hadron jet”, or a shower of particles that were all generated from the original quark/anti-quark pair:

Click for Larger

How wild is that?    And you thought science wasn’t fun.    Shame on you.

You can read up more on quarks, color confinement, hadron jets, gluons, and so forth by going to the Wikipedia article on it here:    quark

“Move it or lose it!”  My parents used it a lot, and so do coaches.    The saying encourages you to drop the plow and get yourself in gear, to quit lollygagging around.    Now the new President wants to give folks a temporary pass on the DTV conversion, and I think that’s a terrible idea. Thankfully, a lot of other people think so as well; now to get the government to agree, without industry pressure.

President-elect Obama has now urged lawmakers to delay the transition to all-digital transmission of over-the-air (OTA) due to, from what pollsters say, nearly 8 million homes that have not “taken action” to upgrade their television sets or buy a digital converter.    The poll apparently also cites something on the order of nearly a fourth of Americans that believe the transition will require them to buy a new TV.   Proponents cite the lack of any more coupons for converter boxes and the lack of education of the masses.

I’m sorry, but there’s only so much you can do when a country-wide transition like this is coming up, because you’re speaking to a vastly intricate demographic, one that you’re never going to fully reach, even if you were to tattoo it on their forehead in fiery letters.    The fact is, a good portion of the people will never convert until they must because they have no other choice.

If you are too stupid, too lax, or too ignorant to have not noticed and understood the half a billion advertisements and PSAs that have littered the radio waves, papers, and TV commercials for the past year about this transition, said it in a million different ways, with multiple approaches to get attention, explain the transition, and inform, then I have no sympathy if February 17th comes and all you get is static instead of American Idol.

Frankly, I’m tired of seeing the notices.   I understood it the first time around.   The next 4,758 times was just wasting my life.    And how this transition is handled will set a huge precident for other technological changes that will come in the future — the switch to IPv6, changing to digital telephones, etc.

The coupon (or lack thereof) issue is something to address, but if you haven’t taken enough interest to sign up for one, then you probably get to buy one at full price.   They’re not THAT awful in cost, and it’s kinda like taxes — if you’re late, you pay a price.   That’s how it goes.

If I felt that not enough effort had been made, I’d think differently.   However, the government has done a good job on this one, the airwaves and media have been swamped with notices, and assistance has been offered.   For those still unmoving in the face of all this, I say:  Tough.

What do you think?   Are you already prepared for the transition and, if not, why not?   Do you think the schedule should be kept or the delay honored?   Shall we hit slackers over the head with a brick?