Is this thunderstorm put together backwards?

So... there I was... watching Top Gear on youtube when I heard the distant rumbles of a thunderstorm.

I decided to take my excellent atmospheric-scientist-in-training with me, Mijo the Dog, to "observe" this incoming thunderstorm.  He's a grad student so mostly I make him carry the gear and take notes.

He is half dachshund, half chiwawa, and half wolf. Look at the steely blue eyes!

Anyways...

As we are walking out to the beach to look at the incoming thunderstorm, some old lady yells down to me from her condo balcony.

"Hey... do you know how TVs work?"  while I think I can answer a solid yes to the question she asked, I was a little worried that she actually meant, "can you make my TV work?"  Which is a solid "probably not."

I can make TVs that I set up work, but the madness that some other clown cobbled together out of DVD players, VCR's, cable, and maybe even antennae... probably not.

Needless to say, my assistant and I were invited into the old people's condo to unfuck their TV.  Granted, I really know jack shit about making TV's work but I think it might be bad luck to not help old people.  Sort of like telling off a nun... it just isn't done! The knight in me wanted to be chivalrous and help the old people with their TV... the Viking in me hoped they would have a hot daughter.  (that was impressed with me making a TV work and walking my girlfriend's dog...)

So there I am in the living room of this condo on the beach when I can hear the mating calls of the thunderstorm that I actually want to be hanging out with rumbling in the background.  I eventually figured out which of the ten remotes in the place made the TV turn on... and called it a success. I explained how the guide button worked and how to scroll up and down. DONE!  I am out!  As thanks they gave me a pocket full of dog treats and a coors light.  Also, they had no daughter.

Finally SCIENCE!

We get to the beach and look out to the gulf.  There is literally a wall of rain on the horizon from as far as I can see to the south to as far as I can see to the north.  All about 5 miles to the east.  AND THE LIGHTENING IS FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!  There are old men leaning on railings talking about how this one is going to be a real "humm dingger" and thirty year old women still wearing their sorority letters commenting how if it wasn't Florida they wouldn't feel safe with their kids so close to a natural disaster... all watching this storm move across the horizon.

God damn I love thunderstorms...

I spot what looks like a wall cloud! but I think to myself, "that is on the wrong side of the storm..."

(There are three things that pilots must always keep on the tip of their awareness. First of all, the wind direction.  Second... the fuel in the tanks as measured in Time x Speed = Distance. And by far the most important, the nearest bar that it wouldn't embarrass your mother if you died in it.)

Being a pilot and all, I realize that the wind direction tonight is backward from normal, and in fact nature got this one right again.  She put the wall cloud on the correct side of the super cell thunderstorm. I think I was probably the only one surprised by the wind direction tonight but, you know, that is how I feel alive and stuff.

Anyways... disappointingly there was no Tornado.

Luckily it is still hurricane season!

Goodnight.

Easter at the grocery store... Dad needs a cat for Christmas

So, my folks came down to visit.  This is the first time that they have both come together to see me since I graduated pilot training.  Not that I think they were opposed to visiting, but I think a trip to eastern New Mexico to stay in a dusty workshop is less likely to make the schedule...

Anyways, it was kind of like taking your vacation with Italians. Most of their time down here was spent in grocery stores, discussing going to the grocery store, and the various merits of all nearby grocery stores...  As it turns out, dinner is an excellent time to discuss what to have for breakfast. Also, my dad is now friends and comrades with the butcher at the Winn-Dixie down the street.  They became superfriends when they got into a discussion about how it helps now days to grunt when you get up.

As it happens, this was the first time that my parents and I had really discussed my going to Mars in person. My mother was not a fan!  Her first protest, was that she would miss me to much.  Though it made me feel bad, she could see it wouldn't sway me.  It made her even more opposed when I told her that skype doesn't work because of the distance.  Her second objection was that I would never give her any grandchildren if I go to Mars.  I told her I would try to make some there for her... also, no good... to far to visit.  Though after a few moments, she reconsidered.  After asking a few questions about how long it would take to get there, what living conditions would be, the possibilities of ever returning to earth... she decided that she would stay in shape and healthy long enough so that she can come visit and maybe even move to Mars too.  This caused Dad to look up from the third book he was finishing this weekend and comment that "she will probably do it too." Grandmothers have been dragging their husbands "downstate" for years to be near their grandkids so I guess this is just a bigger version of that.

Dad mostly thought it was a good idea, especially while watching the news.  Actually he thought it was a great idea when ever the news featured a politician talking.

Also, in other news, it turns out my Dad likes cats!

 It started with Amaretto the cat coming up and tricking him with happy fuzzy purrs... 

Soon they lured him onto the floor by offering to share their favorite cat game.

After a while they were discussing politics and how much the authorities are over reaching into honest hard working people's lives.  Though dad is talking about the taxes and the cats are referring to me not letting them out to kill lizards.  Either way they all agreed... too much government!

(Yes... that is FOX NEWS they are watching at full volume in the background)

Also, all my mom wanted to do was go to the beach and lay in the sun and maybe play just a little bit in the water.  Unfortunately it rained the whole time they were down here.  Except for about twenty minutes while we were here next to this lake.

She didn't get in...

EXPERIMENT UPDATE:  I have to start the rice mind manipulation experiment over.  I opened up the jars and set them on the porch to add a little contamination to move the experiment along. There was a massive storm right after I did that and the jars flooded out.  Stand by for round two.

Positive energy turns out just a reinvention of "Little House on the Prairie" style food preservation...

So, I know that many of you are waiting with baited breath for the results of my mind manipulation of physical matter experiments...

After a month and a half, here are the results so far:

Yea... so... it seems that there has been almost no change.  I have several hypothesizes on why all three jars of rice balls have had such little change so far.

First, that my diligent experimental methods have kept all contamination from the rice and thus the rice is sitting there in a totally sterile environment.  The positive and negative energy from my mind have not been able to have an effect on the rice because there is nothing to protect or preserve the rice from.  (I have just re-invented canning.)

or...

Second, is that my house has so much positive energy flowing through it that nothing bad can happen inside it to include the molding or rotting of food.  Even when I try to project negative energy into the bad rice ball, it is overwhelmed with such positive vibes from my being that it can't possibly be consumed by mold or rot in any way.  (Though I had a few bagels I threw away last week that punch a pretty big hole in that theory.)

or...

Third, maybe the sealed glass jar is keeping all my positive and negative energy away from the rice so that it has no way to be influenced and has thus stayed static.

Experiment Phase II:

So with no discernible change at all after a month and a half, I am going to change the experiment slightly.  The first hypothesis seems most likely so I am going to unseal the jars for a few days  (assuming they don't stink) and let the world interact with the contents.  I will still project positive and negative energy at the rice during this open to the environment few days.  After that, I expect some sort of natural contaminants to enter the jars.  If I can influence things...  all jars should be about the same amount contaminated and I will reseal the jars.  After that, my positive thoughts should protect the good rice ball and rot the bad and uncared about rice.

Stay tooned!

I will admit that this experiment has made me MUCH more conscience of when I am being positive and negative with the world around me.  What I have found is that I can very significantly effect the people and animals around me with my positive and negative energy and outlook.  I have been doing some experiments on people at work and I can change the entire mood in a room or my cockpit with just a few comments or a smile and a greeting.  It feels crazy powerful to do this... Like I am a puppet master or movie director or something.  I will of course continue to use my growing powers to try and make the world a better place, but I still want to be a wizard that can rot rice with my mind!  More practice obviously!

Manipulating the physical world with just my mind!

I just had the first article about my going to Mars published in the online version of Discover Magazine.  here!

So... I am doing an experiment, actually more repeating one.  It supposedly demonstrates the effects of human intentions and consciences on the physical world.  I have a lot of theories about how this might happen but will have to do more experiments myself.

This is a quick overview of the experiment.  There has been a lot published on these experiments.  We will see.  I want it to work!  It would make the universe a more interesting place, but this kind of thing needs verification!

If it works, I plan to get really really really good at blasting my intentions all over the place!  I'll be like a wizard or something!

So far, my own experiments have not progressed beyond the "Hmmm... they all still look the same" stage.

I started off sterilizing all the apparatus.  (Pasta sauce jars) Actually I guess I started off eating pasta, I had to eat it every meal for a week so I would have enough jars.  Not a hardship for me at all!  Anyways... I wanted to make sure that everything was done to stand up to any investigation of my methods. As little room for erroneous results as possible.

Boiling Jars and Lids.  (The sugar, flower, and frankincense containers on the right came with the place... don't think I have become so domesticated that I went out and bought them myself!)

Then I made some rice per the previous experiments, and placed them in labeled jars.


Now I send happy loving thoughts to the one with the smiley face on the left and all the negative energy I can muster into the unhappy one.  Also the control is there to see what happens with no human conscienceness involvement.  (I know the control jar is different... if the results of this experiment show potential, I'll do more and more rigorous experiments to include the same size jar for the control...)

It has been about 10 days since I started this experiment and so far all the rice looks the same in all of the jars.  I would post a second current picture, but it looks exactly like the one above.  I'll post anything as it develops.

Shoe closets are the environmental disaster.

So... many months ago I promised my gf that I would build her a shoe closet.  While the original plans were to be a magnificent synergy of engineering and showmanship not seen since Monticello, assuming Liberaci lived there... unfortunately the cost of tempered glass, mirrors, and tract lighting brought it into being much closer to a basic pine board bookshelf that might eventually have doors... as long as I don't have another vehicle that blows a head gasket. (good wood is expensive) Anyways, so there I am in my parking space about to paint this bookshelf for shoes when I decide try something different.  I have a spray gun that is designed for painting cars... but I figure it might work for bookshelves too if I thin out the paint enough.

It turns out it does!  It works great! I was using water based "Lowe's paint the baby room" brand paint.  I had to thin it down pretty good to get it to go through the gun, but it was working fine... until I got the air hose snagged on a corner of the shelf.  I had just taken the top off the feed cup and had just topped off the thinned paint.  The air hose at the end is basically a big rubber spring so when it released it sprung... and I tossed the whole container of paint up into the air.... way up into the air...!  Luckily about half of it landed on my head.  The other half unfortunately landed on the pristine dark black blacktop of the parking lot.  (did I mention it was white paint?)  Yea... so there I was looking at what should have been a small spill spread across the dark black parking lot like it was fucking nanobots consuming the earth!  I had thinned it out enough that this small cup of paint was spreading across the dark surface in a way that seemed to defy reality.  Well no problem... it is water based paint, I can just mop it up.

NOOOOOOO!!!! So I attempt to mop it up, but the added water from the mop just feeds it.  It starts spreading more!  Though it seems impossible, I now have covered about twenty parking spots with white paint.  Remember I live in Florida in a condo.  For everyone here, their parking spot is like their yard used to be before they retired.  They don't keep a pristine green lawn anymore, they keep a shiny black parking spot... and I am spraying everyone's yard with bleach!

I have the parking spot right next to both the complex manager, and the president of the condo association so I can't even pretend I am not the epicenter of this disaster. I am already the asshole lowering property values with shit cars that leak everywhere that I start loudly at 6 in the morning to go to work.  Now, I am going to be the asshole that ruined the beautiful parking lot too.

(Not cut out for condo life. Makes plans to move to Montana ASAP and become a hermit.)

Shit shit shit... It keep spreading.  I have now accidentally painted about half a football field of parking lot with a single cup of paint.  I am the god damn Jesus Christ of paint, who needs your fishes and loafs... I got a cup of white paint... I'll make the world look like Greece! For some ridiculous reason, it seems to be applying ten times better to the oiled asphalt than it was to the sanded wood shelf but I don't have time to think about that now.

SUDDENLY, Some old Canadian Snow Birds Stop to Talk...
"Hey! what you do'n?  You decide to wash everyone's parking spot?"

I don't have time for this right now. I am trying to reduce the number of letters I get from the home owner's association per month!  This isn't going to help... but no one can refuse a polite conversation with Canadians.

So I go with, "Nice work in Sochi, I spilled some paint... enjoy your evening!"  I then run past their Ontario plated Cadillac with a push broom and a hose.  (Everyone already thinks of me as entertainment around hear anyways, oh well.)

I change tactics and decide to advance in a new direction.  No more moping, I'll just filter this shit on it's way to the ocean.  I threw some rags in front of the drain then took a hose and flooded the whole god damn parking lot. I figured the paint will just float along with the water, the water will go to the drain, and the rags will pull out the paint.

Thank god that finally worked, though for a moment it seemed I had made it even worse if that was possible.

I literally washed the whole parking lot and just filtered the paint out with rags before it left for the ocean.

Fuck me... now back to painting this damn shoe shelf...

I did get the first coat of paint done, but then I had to move off to other adventures for the day like walking the Chihuahua and metal detecting for treasure. (only found a quarter)  I still need to put a second coat of paint on the shelf so I might as well leave it close to where I can paint it. Unfortunately, it is really big... too big in fact to fit in the garage anymore.

As an aside, if I learned one thing from the Ukrainians while I was there, it is "build it BIG!"  By nature, I tend to overbuild.  I wanted to leave the shelf in the parking spot overnight for convenience,  but need to put it in the garage to protect it from the rain, but it didn't fit. Yes, that's right... the shoe shelf wouldn't fit in a 4 car garage.  Like I said, it is to big. So, I just put it in public the hallway for now... should be fine right?

Ukrainians go BIG. This is Ukrainians version of the Iwo Jima monument.  A 5,000 foot giantess of victory. It also does not fit in the garage.

Also... these guys did the math... enjoy the statistics.

Graphic from outerplaces.com.

Mars-One, Pooping on the Internet, and Growing new body parts:

Ok, so I know I am stumbling around the internet like a big dumb animal... sorry if I am leaving big dumb animal turds in all of your inboxes.  I have just started a twitter account, as well as a google+ and linked in.  Actually the last two I might have had without really knowing I had them.  It seems google just signs everyone that walks past a computer up for a google+ account and I have really no idea why I had a linked in account.  I have been trying to not click the "Carpet Bomb Everyone You Have Ever Emailed" button when I sign up for these sites... but sometimes they trick me.  So my apologies to your inboxes if I filled them with unwanted mail.

"So, Nick, why the heck are you pooping all over the internet?" you might ask.

Well, it all comes down to the Mars-One Project.  It is becoming more and more clear to me that the only way for this project to succeed is for all of humanity to get behind it AND stay interested in it.  So, I need to shit all over the internet to try and get people aware of it and interested.  Also, and more selfishly, I want you and all your friends to both want to send me and then keep me alive once I am there on Mars!  It would be pretty dire to get up there, then be subject to budget cuts...

So... the five of you that read this blog, please tell your friends.  Hopefully it will snowball, and I will come across as interesting enough that you want to read more of my blog updates as I explore Martian caves and talk about the night life in the first extra-terrestrial village ever.

I guess what I am saying is... Tell your friends to read this... Also, sign up for my twitter account so I can let you know when I have had a few drinks next to my computer and wrote some more stuff on this blog.

Sign up for my twitters at @NickNoreus.  Actually I am only mostly sure that is my tweet account.  If I am dicking that up, someone please let me know.  I am still trying to figure out how to get my flip phone to make tweets.

Alright, this is starting to sound too much like an NPR pledge drive... so let me tell you a story about a shower I took this week!

After work, I cam home, got into the shower... then had this really weird feeling that some other dude had been in my shower!  At first, I couldn't tell why I had that feeling, but after a little bit of investigation I realized that I could smell him!  Academically I knew no dude had been in my shower, but I really could smell this guy and my body tensed up for a fight because it was sure that there was some dude in my shower.

I looked around to see that there was nothing out of place or added to the bathroom...  but still I could smell this guy.  What the FUCK!?

Then I realized... it was me!  I was the stranger in the shower!

That morning I had gone to an emergency back up supply of deodorant and was not used to that smell. (It was a shitty gas station brand deodorant that I used to keep in my glovebox incase I forgot to put it on before work.) When I took the shower I smelled unfamiliar man and my body didn't like it... My body totally went into fight mode.

Then, as a coincidence that is too good for me to even make up, there was a little finch on my Buick that was defending his nest from the reflection of himself in my rear view mirror.  Unfortunately I don't have a picture or video of the finch, but just imagine a little bird very intently blustering on the mirror of the Buick sure that he was in a fight... but still by himself.

Also, XKCD is really bringing it strong recently for the Atmospheric Science crowd these days.  I would prefer not to post so much from the same site, but he is doing a bang up job.

Personally my favorite chart was always the Skew-T Log-P... and also some experimental one I remember from Penn State, but I haven't seen it in years.

Finally, I just want to bring this to people's attention:
Do it yourself cloning kit. Just a bottle of roses lime juice!
After you reed it, consider the implications... Wow!

Roller Derby Babies and Hot Yoga

So last Saturday I got tricked into going to a roller derby practice.  It was supposed to be a practice bout, (roller derby matches are called "bouts") but in reality it turned out to be girls practicing solid roller derby fundamentals like stopping, falling, and skating backwards.  (Turns out they don't wear fishnets and miniskirts for practice either.)  Useful I'm sure, but probably closer to watching a pitcher practice his curve ball than watching batting practice prior to the home run derby if you don't mind my using a sports analogy to describe sports.  Luckily for me it was held in a building on the Fort Walton Beach fair grounds so I started to wander off to look at the old farm machines.

Suddenly a girl skates up to me, hands me a crying baby, and tells me; "Here... Take him outside if you want." She then skated back to practice.

Holy SHIT!! A baby!?!?!?  I am qualified for many things, but being handed a crying baby then left unsupervised is not one of them.  Usually I hand crying babies BACK!... anyways, I figured I like "outside" maybe this kid and I will get along.  As I started walking toward outside... the intensity of the crying increased exponentially.  It got to the point where I was worried about him bursting the top of his head off if I took one more step toward the doors.  I wasn't going to risk that sort of thing so I went back into the practice room where the crying was about what I would consider an intense whimper.

Somehow, I ended up with all the lost children of the roller derby girls, and I was their peter pan!

No not really... basically I just ended up surrounded by the kids and felt vaguely like the only adult and somehow that made me somewhat responsible for everyone's safety. The only game the kids wanted to play were karate and run in front of the track...  perfect...

Eventually a large piece of paper and a dried out set of markers won the day.  I drew a pirate ship... so then everyone decided to draw bigger better pirate ships.  It kept them alive till I could relinquish responsibility for all the kids.  Also, I drew a dragon that was immune to pirate cannons so I also feel like I won the drawing too.

Yesterday I didn't have to go in to work till the afternoon... so bright an early I get asked the age old question, "Do you want to come to yoga with me?"

At first I thought it was a terrible idea... but after a few moments I realized I didn't have any really good reason not to, so I went.  I asked what to wear and was told "as little as possible."  I went with ranger panties and a band shirt I had from high school.  (a marching band that I was in... not ACDC or anything...)

I have never been to a yoga class before.   Apparently there are different types of yoga and this is what they call "Hot Yoga."  Let me describe it... We got there and an old hippy lady rents me a rubber mat for 2 bucks.  The way they clean this mat is not totally apparent, but whatever... Then I go into the "studio."  It is sweltering.  Like breathing butter.  Probably this is part of the experience to simulate the open air yoga studios of the interior of India.  That is how I rationalized it anyways.  Also, it was filled with beautiful young women wearing skin tight cloths.

Immediately I started to worry!  Why would my very possessive and willing to slap me in public girlfriend bring me to such a place?

Admiral Ackbar knows... "It's a Trap!"

The next hour and a half was watching the old hippy lady perform feats of strength and then failing to emulating them.  Also sweating... did I mention that rubber mat?  When you combine that much sweat and a rubber mat, you have effectively made a Slip'N Slid.  Yes, so all the balancing has to be done on a slip'n slide.

So... Hot yoga  = doing feats of strength surrounded by girls in tight clothing while playing on a slip'n slide.  I'll probably be attending again soon.