SUKRATA

Congratulations to Mark Buehrle on his perfect game!

On 7/23/09, Mark Buehrle of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game.  He retired 27 consecutive batters.  That’s every batter the opponent sent to the plate for the entire game.  There were no hits and no walks.  That’s one of the most rare things in all of baseball.  The last perfect game thrown was 10 years ago and there have only been 18 in history. 

To put a frame around just how rare of a thing it is, there are currently 30 MLB teams that play 162 games each season.  That’s 4,860 games per year.  In the past 10 years since the last perfect game, that’s almost 50 thousand games.  So it’s only happened one time in the past 50 thousand MLB games!

Without a ton of reasearch, I can’t say how many teams and games there were over the course of the past 100 years, so I’ll just estimate.  If there were always 30 teams at 100 games per year for 100 years, that would be (roughly) 300,000 games.  That works out to a rough average of  in 16,500 games!

Then, this evening I read that he extended his perfect game to the next game he pitched and retired the next 18 batters he faced as well.  That allowed him to set another Major league record for the most consecutive batters retired.

Any way you work those numbers, it is quite an accomplishment.  Congratulations to him.

Multiple Me’s

If I was able to live many different lives either at the same time or one at a time, here are some of the lifestyles I would lead.  Obviously, I wouldn’t trade the one I have for another one, but just for fun…

1. Travel writer - I love to travel and like to write
2. Armed Forces - Army, Air Force, Navy, but probably not Marines
3. Mountain Man - A hermit like life - maybe somewhere in Montana
4. Teacher - The older I get, the more I think I may have liked it and may have been good at it
5. Ex-Pat - Live in multiple different countries for multiple years each
6. Scientist - Physicist, chemist, aerospace, etc
7. Gigolo - obviously

A long time ago, I thought I wanted to be in the financial industry.  Present economic issues aside, I’m glad I didn’t go that route.  I realize now that I simply wanted to understand more about how the whole financial system works - I dont’ actually want to work there though.

I also considered the “Dolphin Trainer” route, but the more I think about it, I don’t think it is as glamorous as it sounds. 

Hmm, what am I missing?

An interesting Facebook ‘friend’ suggestion

I know how most of the social networking sites (like Facebook) make their connections.  There are primary connections like people you went to high school or college with.  There are secondary connections like friends of friends.  Then there are connection suggestions based on location and ‘likes’ and all kinds of other things.  It’s actually pretty cool and impressive.

One of the recent Facebook ‘friend’ suggestions stuck out though.  It was a guy I lived next door to over 5 years ago.  He still lives in the same place, but we are in a different city.  We haven’t contacted each other since we left that address and I haven’t googled or facebooked or otherwise searched for him.  He is not connected on Facebook to anyone I am ‘Facebook friends’ with.  Additionally, I did not list my address with Facebook, nor did my wife (who we’re connected as spouses on facebook).  If our address was on Facebook, I would still be impressed that they went so far as to match us back to old addresses and dig up neighbors.

Nevertheless, they suggested him as a friend.  I’m still curious and interested in how they dug that one up.

Sadly, We’re the Redneck’s…

My wife has been cutting my hair for about 7 years now.  We’ve got a standard clipper with the length attachments and it does a fine job.  No one’s made fun of me yet!  When it’s warm enough outside, we cut my hair outside so we don’t have a mess of hair to clean up.

Our back yard faces a pond that has about a dozen other houses around it.  Our neighbors at one of the other houses are avid fishermen and often pull out lawn chairs to their corner of the pond and sit and fish and drink.  Sometimes they leave the cooler and chairs out there for days at a time.

During my most recent haircut, I was facing the pond and watched a 5 year old girl dragging a lawn chair to the pond.  She worked with effort and determination pausing only once for a rest.  It seemed like it took her several minutes to get to the pond. 

I know at other points in time we’ve both mentioned that the neighbors would sit out there for hours, or even all day.  Sometimes there would be just two, and sometimes five or more.  I pointed out the whole thing to my wife and with a slightly embarrased tone of voice said “Sadly, we’re the rednecks in this situation…”. 

She laughed quite a bit.  I like making her laugh.

Two cool new technologies

I just read about 2 cool new technologies that I think have great possibilities.  I haven’t heard jack about the last few technologies I thought were cool, so I’m afraid of jinxing these.

The first is using urine to create hydrogen (for the hydrogen economy).  Someone figured out that the urea in your pee has more hydrogen that’s easier to get at than water does.  The new process is more or less the same as getting hydrogen from water, but gets at least twice as much hydrogen out for a quarter of the energy put in.  Almost all the tech is readily scalable for wide commercial use.  As a bonus, it uses pee and partially cleans it out of the water it is in.
http://www.physorg.com/news165836803.html

The second is ‘a new wonder material’ that is one atom thick.  It conducts electricity 100 times faster than silicon and has stronger bonds (even at 1 atom thick) than diamonds.  It’s called graphene.  Here’s a quote from the article linked to below:
“It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured,” Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.
http://tinyurl.com/graphene1

The best fireworks I’ve ever seen

As part of an internship I had one summer, I was housed in a dormatory with many of the other interns.  It was a 3 story building in a place that didn’t have ANY other 3 story buildings.  On the 4th of July, a few of us found our way to the roof.  The roof took us to about the level of the treetops and allowed us to see for miles in every direction.  It was perfect weather to start the night, but there were storms forecast to roll in that evening, so we were hoping for the best.

Just as it was getting dark, way off in the distance, we saw lightning.  We were a little concerned that it was going to put a damper on the fireworks and make our perfect vantange point worthless.  As soon as it got dark, fireworks shows started.  A couple popped up, then a couple more.  Soon we were watching 7 different shows all at the same time.  It was really something special.

To the south, the thunderstorms had grown in size and intensity and seemed to be headed our way.  About 10 minutes into the shows, I started to watch the thunderstorm instead of the fireworks.  The storm was much larger in size than all the fireworks shows put together and the lightning displays made the fireworks displays seem like backyard bottle rockets being launched.  To the south were 3 fireworks displays backdropped by the thunderstom.  Soon, one of the displays stopped.  We assume the storm had overtaken that area.  A few minutes later, the other two shows were doused.  It didn’t matter though.  The lightning show was dazzling and the thunder started to crackle and roll and drown out all but the loudest booms from fireworks shows.

It didn’t seem to matter that 3 shows had been drown out.  We had at least 4 more to watch.  But at the same time, we didn’t really care about the other 4 shows, because the storm was the best show in town.  The lightning was blue, yellow and white and appeared in several different shapes.  The thunder was powerfully loud and crackled, boomed and rolled in many differe ways.  

We started to wonder how long the other fireworks shows would last and how long it would take the storm to reach us.  Five to ten minutes later we felt the winds and the first few sprinkles and took cover off the roof.  The storm moved in fast and battered the building with rain.  The brightness of the lightning lit the rooms of the dorm and the thunder shook everything. 

It was a hell of a storm and the best fireworks show I’ve ever seen.

Best New Company Name

Today’s best Fark article headline:
Russian energy company Gazprom announces new Nigerian partnership, picks the most amusingly inappropriate name ever 

The headline of the article is:
Racism debate after Russian and Nigerian gas companies combine to form ‘Nigaz’

A bonus from the article:
One Nigerian in Lagos said: ‘White people are making too much of this.  ‘As long as the Russians pay us, they can call it what they like.’

I’m proud of my wife

Last week my wife was stopped at a stop light and a young woman bumped her from behind.  The only damage was that the paint on the bumper was scratched up.  Through all the events so far, my wife has been flawless - from the handling of the initial situation through dealing with the other person and getting the bumper fixed. 

The part that I’m most proud of her about is that she’s doing the right thing even though it means more work for her.  She’s trying to resolve the situation in the way that’s best for both us, and the girl that bumper tapped her when she could have easily just called her insurance company and filed a claim.  Filing an insurance claim would have been best for us, but not best for the young woman.  Going through the insurance company would have been a much easier process and provided a rental car while our car was being fixed.  Instead, my wife did extra work on her part to avoid the insurance company so that the girl didn’t suffer increased rates and marks against her license for such a little thing.

I’m proud of the way my wife has handled everything related to this little accident.  I hope that the girl realizes how nice my wife is being.  I makes me feel good about the world to know that there are people like my wife in it.

You Would!

As part of a normal cross cube conversation, one of my co-workers said “I like Chryslers”.  Another co-worker retorted “You Would!”.  That brought a lull to the conversation as people processed it.  After a few seconds, I gave up and, while snickering, said “I don’t even know what that means!”.  He replied “Neither do I!” and we both started laughing.

I just thought that was funny for some reason.

Summer bumps and bruises

I’m hobbling from a possible broken toe I suffered at a BBQ/Pool Party last weekend.

My son is sunbunt and has a solidly bruised and scabbed elbow from a wipe out.

My daughter has a fairly large popped blister on her hand from over-doing it on the monkey bars.  She also has a decently sized scrape on the bridge of her nose from a swimming pool accident.

My wife is recovering from her 2nd carpal tunnel surgery, so she has the kung fu grip of a 2 year old.

We’re all a little battered or bruised in one way or another, but I like to think of them as the good kinds of bumps and bruises.