A Cross Walk
Hello World,
Well, when no one was watching, our weather around here actually improved, and for those among us who consider ourselves the professional arbiters of the human condition, it was pretty hard to find anything to complain about. Of course, we all know that age-old saying about how everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. On the other hand, if people did have the power to control the weather, I have the feeling that no good would come of it, and things would end up getting a lot worse before they got any better. And for the KGB agents monitoring my email on behalf of the Kremlin's infernal weather machine, let me just say, "I love Mother Russia! Long live the Russian government, and all the dear comrades, and long may they wave."
Technically, I'm not allowed to tell anyone this, because of the HIPAA regulations that we're all so fond of, but rather than throwing away an outdated patient census from the hospital, I was using parts of it as scrap paper at home. I will say right up front that there is very little about the patient census that can be said to be interesting in any way, and that hasn't changed at all over the years. But I admit that I was arrested by the unlikely name of DEFU, CARMEN TANG that showed up on one page among all the rest of the Carters, Daltons and Fitzgibbons. I consider this Carmen Tang Defu a name to conjure with.
Speaking of names to conjure with, Bill and I were on the highway recently and spotted a white van going past us that said "Bates Ambulette Service" on the side. Honestly, who comes up with names like this, you really have to wonder. Do they really think, after "Psycho" as well as the sequels and remake of "Psycho," that anyone is going to call and order transportation from some place called the Bates Ambulette Service??? I said to Bill, they should just go ahead and call it the Bates Motel & Ambulette Service, and leave it at that. I mean, you just have to wonder.
Meanwhile at work, everyone knows that they make the employees park miles away from the hospital, and then take their lives in their hands crossing the most perilous intersections trying to get to their offices. The worst of all has a blinking light at the entrance to the Emergency Room, and you can easily get run over from six different directions by a variety of cars, trucks, ambulances, ambulettes, police cars, fire trucks and school buses. Years ago, there were pedestrian cross walks painted on the streets, but they have long since worn away, and we were convinced that no one would re-paint them because it would interfere with the hospital's plan to drum up more business for their Emergency Room by running people over in that intersection. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I left work one day last week and found all new, bright and shiny, freshly-painted cross walk lines on all four sides of the intersection, for all the world to see. Of course, I could have done without that sign they put up that said, "Hit Pedestrians Here," but you can't have everything, I suppose.
While we're on the subject of walking, I may as well say that the park where I go on vacation is like an ugly child that only a mother could love. It hasn't changed much in the nearly 50 years that my family has been going there, and probably not much before that either. The first time we went camping at Wildwood, I was four years old, and so I grew up on the place and appreciate its quirky charm, like a dear old friend with some bad habits. On an objective basis, it can be a pretty hard sell to newcomers, however, and it has many notable drawbacks as a vacation destination, for normal people who have no sentimental attachments to it. One of the biggest ones, literally, is known as the hill to the beach. If you happen to be camping in A section, right near what we used to call the old Ranger Station, which is now the Camp Store, going to the beach is not such a huge undertaking. You can grab a few necessities, skip along the shortcut to the parking lot, and hit the hill to the beach in nothing flat. However, where my campsite is in C section, it's just about the farthest site from the beach in the whole park, and just getting to the Camp Store with all of your beach gear is a hike in itself. Then you still have to take the shortcut, and then the hill to the beach. By the time you get to the beach after carrying everything with you, it's about all you can do to collapse in the sand and pant. There is no such thing as going back up to the campsite if you forget anything, in fact, if you suggested such a thing, they would carry you off the beach on a stretcher and make you lie down in the shade until your sanity returned. It's a lucky thing that it's downhill to the beach, and uphill to go back to the campground, otherwise, no one would ever go to the beach in the first place.
The hill has always seemed long and steep to everyone who uses it, and over the years as I've gotten older and my beach supplies have gotten heavier, it seems to have gotten even longer and steeper, in spite of any evidence to the contrary. In fact, it's obvious that the hill is exactly the same in every way that it ever has been, because it has never been repaved in all the years that we've been going there. Once they started using more trucks and electric carts at the park, they added in a wooden sidewalk for people to hop up on and get out of the way of the vehicles, but the hill itself is just the same. If anyone had asked me to describe it, especially after coming back up from the beach, I would have readily claimed that the hill was at least a mile long, with an incline of 45 degrees. At least that's the way it feels, and anyone who has ever tramped up it will agree.
Of course, we all know how Bill loves a research challenge, so he decided to examine this scientifically. First he got what is known as a "trundle wheel," which you roll along with you and it clicks every 3 feet. We rolled it all the way to the boardwalk, and found the hill was in reality, only about 700 feet in length, as impossible as that seems to believe. Then we used an inclinometer to measure the slope of the hill, which turned out to be a mere 10 degrees, no matter how we shook and banged on the inclinometer to make it change the reading. That was as far as we got with that, and I don't mind saying, found it discouraging news after all these years that the hill was not this monster gargantuan obstacle that we conquered with blood, sweat and tears twice a day. It sure felt like it.
After we got home, I said it would be interesting to figure out how tall the hill was, from the low end at the boardwalk to the top of the hill at the parking lot. Bill said that we wouldn't be able to figure that out, geometrically speaking, because all we had was one side and one angle of the triangle we were trying to plot. I said, "Au contraire!" (That's French for "Carry your own darned beach chair!") I said we knew all three angles of this imaginary triangle, because the slope was 10 degrees, the angle for the height of the hill would be 90 degrees, and that left only 80 degrees for the other angle, plus we knew the length of the side acting as the hypotenuse besides. Sure enough, Bill was able to find this arcane algebra web site that helps you compute the sine for the opposite side divided by the hypotenuse. When you take the sine of the 10 degree angle (0.1736) and divide the opposite side by the length (700) of the hypotenuse, you would be surprised, as we were, to find out that the height of the hill must be 121 feet, and believe me, it feels every bit of it. And keep in mind, this was figured out the old-fashioned way, using real math, and not that New Math that is all the rage nowadays where nothing adds up. However, I will say that if anyone asks me, after I've just climbed back up from the beach how big is the hill, I will still tell them that it's a mile long and 45 degrees steep, but at least now I'll know that's not technically accurate.
In other technology news, I was copying some information onto a CD recently, and noticed that the sleeve had a series of pictures telling me how to handle the media for best results. There were eight pictures in all, and six of them had "X"s through them, while two had check marks instead. I'm passing this along as a public service, in the event that anyone else has some of these Verbatim Data Life Plus Colors CD-RW 80 disks and wonders about their care. As far as I can tell, you're not supposed to let them drink or smoke, you shouldn't throw pens or pencils at them, or balance them on your finger. There's another picture that looks like the disk is hosting a flea circus, complete with marching band, or perhaps it's supposed to represent the lather from dandruff shampoo instead. In any case, you shouldn't do that with your disk either, although I wouldn't expect that to be such a common problem with disks that they have to draw you a picture to make sure you don't do it. On the other hand, I guess if people have been letting their disks smoke and drink, it would seem that anything goes!
Well, when no one was watching, our weather around here actually improved, and for those among us who consider ourselves the professional arbiters of the human condition, it was pretty hard to find anything to complain about. Of course, we all know that age-old saying about how everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. On the other hand, if people did have the power to control the weather, I have the feeling that no good would come of it, and things would end up getting a lot worse before they got any better. And for the KGB agents monitoring my email on behalf of the Kremlin's infernal weather machine, let me just say, "I love Mother Russia! Long live the Russian government, and all the dear comrades, and long may they wave."
Technically, I'm not allowed to tell anyone this, because of the HIPAA regulations that we're all so fond of, but rather than throwing away an outdated patient census from the hospital, I was using parts of it as scrap paper at home. I will say right up front that there is very little about the patient census that can be said to be interesting in any way, and that hasn't changed at all over the years. But I admit that I was arrested by the unlikely name of DEFU, CARMEN TANG that showed up on one page among all the rest of the Carters, Daltons and Fitzgibbons. I consider this Carmen Tang Defu a name to conjure with.
Speaking of names to conjure with, Bill and I were on the highway recently and spotted a white van going past us that said "Bates Ambulette Service" on the side. Honestly, who comes up with names like this, you really have to wonder. Do they really think, after "Psycho" as well as the sequels and remake of "Psycho," that anyone is going to call and order transportation from some place called the Bates Ambulette Service??? I said to Bill, they should just go ahead and call it the Bates Motel & Ambulette Service, and leave it at that. I mean, you just have to wonder.
Meanwhile at work, everyone knows that they make the employees park miles away from the hospital, and then take their lives in their hands crossing the most perilous intersections trying to get to their offices. The worst of all has a blinking light at the entrance to the Emergency Room, and you can easily get run over from six different directions by a variety of cars, trucks, ambulances, ambulettes, police cars, fire trucks and school buses. Years ago, there were pedestrian cross walks painted on the streets, but they have long since worn away, and we were convinced that no one would re-paint them because it would interfere with the hospital's plan to drum up more business for their Emergency Room by running people over in that intersection. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I left work one day last week and found all new, bright and shiny, freshly-painted cross walk lines on all four sides of the intersection, for all the world to see. Of course, I could have done without that sign they put up that said, "Hit Pedestrians Here," but you can't have everything, I suppose.
While we're on the subject of walking, I may as well say that the park where I go on vacation is like an ugly child that only a mother could love. It hasn't changed much in the nearly 50 years that my family has been going there, and probably not much before that either. The first time we went camping at Wildwood, I was four years old, and so I grew up on the place and appreciate its quirky charm, like a dear old friend with some bad habits. On an objective basis, it can be a pretty hard sell to newcomers, however, and it has many notable drawbacks as a vacation destination, for normal people who have no sentimental attachments to it. One of the biggest ones, literally, is known as the hill to the beach. If you happen to be camping in A section, right near what we used to call the old Ranger Station, which is now the Camp Store, going to the beach is not such a huge undertaking. You can grab a few necessities, skip along the shortcut to the parking lot, and hit the hill to the beach in nothing flat. However, where my campsite is in C section, it's just about the farthest site from the beach in the whole park, and just getting to the Camp Store with all of your beach gear is a hike in itself. Then you still have to take the shortcut, and then the hill to the beach. By the time you get to the beach after carrying everything with you, it's about all you can do to collapse in the sand and pant. There is no such thing as going back up to the campsite if you forget anything, in fact, if you suggested such a thing, they would carry you off the beach on a stretcher and make you lie down in the shade until your sanity returned. It's a lucky thing that it's downhill to the beach, and uphill to go back to the campground, otherwise, no one would ever go to the beach in the first place.
The hill has always seemed long and steep to everyone who uses it, and over the years as I've gotten older and my beach supplies have gotten heavier, it seems to have gotten even longer and steeper, in spite of any evidence to the contrary. In fact, it's obvious that the hill is exactly the same in every way that it ever has been, because it has never been repaved in all the years that we've been going there. Once they started using more trucks and electric carts at the park, they added in a wooden sidewalk for people to hop up on and get out of the way of the vehicles, but the hill itself is just the same. If anyone had asked me to describe it, especially after coming back up from the beach, I would have readily claimed that the hill was at least a mile long, with an incline of 45 degrees. At least that's the way it feels, and anyone who has ever tramped up it will agree.
Of course, we all know how Bill loves a research challenge, so he decided to examine this scientifically. First he got what is known as a "trundle wheel," which you roll along with you and it clicks every 3 feet. We rolled it all the way to the boardwalk, and found the hill was in reality, only about 700 feet in length, as impossible as that seems to believe. Then we used an inclinometer to measure the slope of the hill, which turned out to be a mere 10 degrees, no matter how we shook and banged on the inclinometer to make it change the reading. That was as far as we got with that, and I don't mind saying, found it discouraging news after all these years that the hill was not this monster gargantuan obstacle that we conquered with blood, sweat and tears twice a day. It sure felt like it.
After we got home, I said it would be interesting to figure out how tall the hill was, from the low end at the boardwalk to the top of the hill at the parking lot. Bill said that we wouldn't be able to figure that out, geometrically speaking, because all we had was one side and one angle of the triangle we were trying to plot. I said, "Au contraire!" (That's French for "Carry your own darned beach chair!") I said we knew all three angles of this imaginary triangle, because the slope was 10 degrees, the angle for the height of the hill would be 90 degrees, and that left only 80 degrees for the other angle, plus we knew the length of the side acting as the hypotenuse besides. Sure enough, Bill was able to find this arcane algebra web site that helps you compute the sine for the opposite side divided by the hypotenuse. When you take the sine of the 10 degree angle (0.1736) and divide the opposite side by the length (700) of the hypotenuse, you would be surprised, as we were, to find out that the height of the hill must be 121 feet, and believe me, it feels every bit of it. And keep in mind, this was figured out the old-fashioned way, using real math, and not that New Math that is all the rage nowadays where nothing adds up. However, I will say that if anyone asks me, after I've just climbed back up from the beach how big is the hill, I will still tell them that it's a mile long and 45 degrees steep, but at least now I'll know that's not technically accurate.
In other technology news, I was copying some information onto a CD recently, and noticed that the sleeve had a series of pictures telling me how to handle the media for best results. There were eight pictures in all, and six of them had "X"s through them, while two had check marks instead. I'm passing this along as a public service, in the event that anyone else has some of these Verbatim Data Life Plus Colors CD-RW 80 disks and wonders about their care. As far as I can tell, you're not supposed to let them drink or smoke, you shouldn't throw pens or pencils at them, or balance them on your finger. There's another picture that looks like the disk is hosting a flea circus, complete with marching band, or perhaps it's supposed to represent the lather from dandruff shampoo instead. In any case, you shouldn't do that with your disk either, although I wouldn't expect that to be such a common problem with disks that they have to draw you a picture to make sure you don't do it. On the other hand, I guess if people have been letting their disks smoke and drink, it would seem that anything goes!
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 7:09 PM
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