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I sat, waiting for the connecting flight to Cleveland, listening to something on my iPhone and tooling around on my Macbook Air.  I felt a tension in my chest when I looked around at all the people doing something similar including overly-loud-ichat-user, annoying-physics-game-on-iphone-kid, and semi-staged I-point-at-your-macbook-screen-you-point-at-mine-couple.   I wanted to rise from my chair and yell “I am comfortable in a command line, I run 2 flavors of linux, and manage 3 dedicated windows servers.  I know some C++ and non-Apple devices outnumber Apple devices 2 to 1 in my home.  I’m not one of you!”  My scream would not be blocked out by the shitty white standard iPod earbuds, and no one would be quick enough to capture it on their iOS devices nor record it with their iSight cameras.  Steve recommended I put that line on a t-shirt.

I’m going to buy an Android phone and compile a copy of Darwin to return harmony to my technological soul.

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I was asked to run a session on teach Cub Scouts Science and one of the points I try to drive home was that most kids have some sort of “Wow” moment.  Mine were viewing the rings of Saturn on a camping trip and learning about some absoludicrously old rocks in Canada.  I use the pillars of creation in the Eagle Nebula and some very small pictures.

I quickly determined that I had a lot of work to do after the following:

  • One person asked if a magnetized quarter would still work (I’m not sure how they were planning to magnetize it)
  • Someone declared that a jet engine and a flying hoop operated on the same principle
  • Someone kept referring to how she was going to have her kids “make science” which sounds like a euphemism biologists use
  • After deploying a water bottle rocket someone asked if a foot pump would work instead of a bicycle pump and if one could use another fluid besides water which begs yet more questions

One fellow seemed to be bent on oneupsmanship and rattled off 6 activities he’d done with his Scouts asking after each “have you tried that?”  To all 6 boring milquetoast ideas that Mr. Wizard couldn’t make fun, yes.  I felt like a bit of a dick and thought I should go into blackface and thank massa for showerin’ learning on me. Luckily most of these folk will be dead by the time I enter science advocacy 45 years from now.  If only I could stop their children.

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A while back, I thought about making bacon chip cookies, and tonight I did.  They were quite nice, and I think I’d prepare them when I have curious company or need to fulfill a stereotype.  The more interesting part was acquiring the bacon at the Genuardi’s Checkout Line.

Me: Please don’t waste a bag to wrap the bacon separately.
Cashier: You don’t want the bacon touching the other food, do you?
Me: Why not?
Cashier: It’s bacon, it has juices.
Me: So you’re telling me that your store sells leaky bacon?
Cashier: No, but some of the bacon might go through the packaging.
Me: Please, don’t wrap it.
Cashier: Ok, but make sure you cook it just in case something gets in.

I’m confident that the shrink wrapped packaging inspected by the FDA for a meat that’s probably irradiated that I’m going to prepare over a 350° griddle and then crumble up and put into a cookie to be baked at 375° should be sufficiently safe.  Should the bacon magically exit the packaging through an aggregate quantum super-position tunneling effect in a process that would normally require millions of times the age of the universe to happen, I’d gladly suffer any intestinal disease to have witnessed a macroscopic manifestation of such quantum wierdness.

If the baconness were to spread, it’s more likely to be stopped by the glass containers of the other ingredients that shared a back with it than by the seran wrap-like condom of a wasted grocery bag.  Besides, what what if bacon-ness spread?  I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.  If bacon held its consistency better I’d use it as a coffee stirrer and in its thicker form a kind of edible fork for things that are scooped like rice or oatmeal.

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Units can request a site by completing a reasonably simple form, but some of the responses are… interesting:

“Reason for Request: Medical Need
If a request is for a medical need, please explain: Medical Need”

Site are requested by choosing from a drop-down menu, and a unit requested the following:

“First Preference: Please choose one
Second Preference: optional
Third Preference: optional”

During the early days during testing I encountered some problems such as people not realizing what the form was for despite the phrase “site request” being used 20 times:

“Comments: I want to talk to Mikey”

Scouting, beating a path of technology into the 20th century.