Eye Migraines Suck

June 5, 2008 – 8:40 pm

I'm not normally afflicted with migraines. That's why when I got one at work earlier this week, accompanied by strobing glare encroaching from the periphery of my vision, I thought it was eye strain. I'd been sitting in an office with overhead fluorescents on a dimmer switch that had been turned down, and the only other times this happened (like 5+ years ago) I was in the exact same situation. But I went to an opthamologist today who ruled it an "Opthalmic Migraine" (despite the fact that the overhead fluorescent lights in her waiting room were causing me discomfort and to see glare spots and I had to look out the window).

Anyhow, that's why I ran a sub-standard post on Wednesday (just pushed out one I'd written but had been holding off because I felt it needed more oomph), why this is today's post, and why I'm going to take a week off to give my eyes a little bit of a rest. I still have to work and tend to the "money-makers," but my eyes still don't feel 100%, so I'm having to cut time in front of the screen where I can.

Hopefully that won't stifle the momentum I've been building, and I promise I'll be back with a new post on June 16th.

Posted in Health | Post A Comment »

These Are NOT Equivalent

June 4, 2008 – 12:21 am

Now that I'm into my third calendar month of publishing this, I thought I'd shake things up a little bit and explore some things that are not equivalent. And if you're wondering why former Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle is headlining today's installment, read on.

The odd thing is that this photo is from the invitation to the inaugural ball for George H.W. Bush. Despite all the good photos of Quayle (for all his faults, he was pretty photogenic), they decided to use one where he looks like he's trying not to fart.

Thing The First: "hits" and "page views"

Whenever I talk to someone who has a web site, I can tell they don't know how it works if they talk about how many hits it got. Hits are a technical term meaning one request for a file from your web server. If your home page has 3 graphics on it and an external stylesheet, one person viewing your home page one time represents five hits (the home page HTML document, the three graphics, and the stylesheet). Better metrics to use (and ones that makes you look like you know what you're doing) are:

• Page views: this is how many times the main document was requested and ignores all the hits on the supporting files.
• Uniques: This is the number of unique visitors your site had in a specific period. So if I came to your site three separate times today, I'd count as one unique visitor. If that's a big number, it can be more impressive than page views.

Sadly, it's easy to fall into this trap. I do sometimes, myself. The problem is that because people have heard "hits" so much, it's easy to talk down to them and use "hits" when you mean "page views" and you know the difference. We need to "elevate our discourse" on the topic and try not to use "hits" and "pageviews" interchangeably.

Thing The Second: "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less"

I'm not the first to point this out, but it seems some people still aren't getting the message. "I could care less" means that you actually do care, because you're stating that there's a lower level of care you could assign to the subject. It's when you "couldn't care less" that there's no smaller flying fig you could give.

Thing The Third:

--- and ---

Oddly enough, I was describing this one to my neighbors. They laughed a little, but it turned out they had no idea that it was straight out of the October 5th, 1988 vice presidential debate between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen.

Now, the incident to which this refers occurred over 19-and-a-half years ago, so it might have flown right by someone who's in their early 30s today. But, while it's not such a major turning point in American history that it gets taught to every high school student, it did warrant its own Wikipedia entry. And if you saw it live and experienced the aftermath as a politically aware adult, particularly if you were a Democrat, you havent forgotten it.

So, for all the readers who looked at this and didn't get it, there are a bunch of older folks (like my wife) who laughed heartily.

Got your own non-equivalents? Post them in the comments below.

Posted in Misc. | 1 Comment »

Alas, Poor Yorick...

June 2, 2008 – 12:26 am

Friday's column, where we figured out the weight of the air inside an airhead, made me think on the topic of the volume of a skull and what else could fit in there besides 17 featherweights of air. Fourteen-hundred cubic centimeters of volume in a human skull, 1.4 liters, 47.34 fuid ounces, 15.89% of a peck. Based on my experiments to determine how many pickled peppers are in a peck, the human skull would fit around 78 pickled peppers.

We talk about people having a head full of rocks, head full of air, head full of booze... And that's one that's easy to calculate, isn't it? Alcohol is measured by volume. So if we used Budweiser, which is 5% alcohol by volume, the alcohol would represent 1/20th of the volume of the skull (1400 milliliters). So if you drank a skull full of Budweiser, you'd get 70 milliliters of alcohol, or 2.47 ounces of pure alcohol. If you drank a skull full of 80 proof vodka... well, you'd die. That's just short of two 750 ml bottles, and just short of 20 ounces of pure alcohol. If you drank them quickly enough, you'd die.

But, just for argument's sake, let's say that when you drank a beer, all the alcohol went to your head, and you were an airhead (with an escape valve to release the air pressure as the alcohol entered). How much beer would you have to drink to completely fill your head with alcohol? 28 liters or roughly 7.4 gallons of beer. On the other hand, you'd only need 118.35 ounces of 80 proof vodka (roughly four 750 ml bottles and a 12-ounce can of vodka).

But what else could we put in a skull besides alcohol? Sour cream dip? A popular brand of sour cream dip has around the same weight to volume ratio as water, as they measure a 2-tablespoon serving as 30 grams, so a skull full of sour cream dip would weigh around 1.4 kilograms, same as if it was filled with water. But while a skull full of water would have zero Calories, a skull full of sour cream dip would have 2800 Calories.

I was going to get into the various characteristics of a skull full of SPAM®, the vibrant lunch meat from Hormel, but I couldn't easily find a factor for the weight to volume ratio of SPAM® and didn't have the time, energy, or intestinal fortitude to do the measurements in the Rough Equivalents labs (a.k.a. my kitchen) this weekend. On the other hand, I was lucky enough to learn that Sodium Nitrite is used to keep SPAM® pink. If they took it out, your SPAM® would turn gray and be unappetizing. Yeah, because when it's good and pink, no one can refuse the canned meat goodness of SPAM®

So if any of you are in the mood for a homework assignment, find out the weight to volume ratio of SPAM®, figure out how much can fit into 1400 cubic centimeters, and post the amount and some fun Rough Equivalents in the comments below.

Posted in Volume, Weight/Mass | Post A Comment »

Bearable Lightness

May 30, 2008 – 12:25 am

In past posts, I've talked about how heavy things are, but what about how light they are?

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, my mom and stepdad visited to celebrate her birthday, and as I was describing this little experiment in blogging to her, she suggested I use "light as a feather" as a theme. I thought that was a good idea and there were probably lots of sites online where I could find out the weight of a feather.

Wrong... for a number of reasons. Every bird has a number of different types of feathers of different sizes, textures, and weights. And then you have the fact that different sized birds of the same breeds will have different sized feathers, so the flight feathers from two eagles could weigh different amounts.

One thing I did run across, though was this answer to the question of how much a feather weighed. I liked his methodology, which was to estimate the weight of all the feathers on a bird and then get an average per-feather weight. Since Rough Equivalents are nothing if not inexact (they're roughly the right number, but we're not calculating to 100 places of pi), this sounded good. Unfortunately, his numbers were really bad guesstimates.

See, he'd read somewhere (as I did in my research) that a bird's feathers weighed about twice as much as the bird's skeleton. This is true of a bald eagle. But he guesstimated that on a 20 pound bird, you had 5 pounds of "guts," 5 pounds of skeleton, and 10 pounds of feathers. Estimating 8,000 feathers on his bird, he came up with a figure that a feather weighed .00125 pounds. That's 1/800th of a pound, or around .57 grams. But that's pretty heavy when you're going for things that are light. A small paper clip is only .5 grams.

I did more research and found a number of sites stating that, on a bald eagle, the skeleton represents 5-6% of the bird's weight, which would mean that the feathers would be 10-12% of its weight. If an average female bald eagle (the females are bigger than the males) weighed around 5.8 kilograms, 6% of that would be 348 grams. Double it and you've got 696 grams. Counts of the feathers on an eagle range between 7000 and 7200, so we'll split the difference at 7100.

So how much does a feather weigh? For a bald eagle, her feathers average out to roughly 98 milligrams each, or just under 1/10th of a gram. So when you get a headache and take two regular strength ibuprofen tablets, you're taking approximately 4 feathers of ibuprofen.

And now that I know the weight of a feather, I start thinking about the term "featherweight," which is a weight class in professional boxing. In the U.S. and England, a featherweight boxer weighs in at a maximum of 126 pounds or 583,191 feathers.

If you want to figure your weight in feathers...

• 10,201 feathers per kilogram
• 4628.5 feathers per pound
• 289.25 feathers per ounce

But another fun thing I ran across was the weight of air. If anything's lighter than a feather, air's got to be it. But air is heavier than you might think. At 1 atmosphere, or "sea level", one liter of air weighs roughly 1.2 grams, or one cubic meter of air weighs 1.2 kilograms.

An olympic size pool contains 2500 cubic meters of water. Replace that water with air and you've got 3,000 kilograms (3 metric tons) of air. So the air in an "empty" olympic size swimming pool weighs about the same as the curb weight of a Hummer H2.

Of course, my mother called while I was writing this, and I told her that fact, so she asked me how much an airhead weighs. Well, the average volume of a human skull is 1.4 liters, meaning 1.68 grams of air in an airhead... or 17 feathers.

What Rough Equivalents can you come up with for air and feathers? Post them in the comments below.

Posted in Volume, Weight/Mass | 1 Comment »