Off to visit my sister’s family in DC. I’m hoping to attend tonight’s Cards/D-Backs game at Busch Stadium. This is a trip I’ve been dying to make for a long time, and I’m very grateful to my sister and her husband for making it possible.

I’ll be back Monday, preparing for when classes start next Wednesday. I’m bringing my laptop so I can work on some projects if I have time. That means there’s a chance I’ll be posting from the road.

Update: WOW! My duffle bag is exactly 10X16X24. It’s almost as though the people who made it were thinking about what they were doing!

Here’s something I wrote a while back in a comment on an Intelligent Design post at Bobovski‘s, where I was playing Devil’s Advocate:

If I were charged with teaching science to kids in a public school, I’d set up my class so that it was 3 days of science history, and two days of science lab. Not lab in the sense that we go into a laboratory and put on white coats and goggles to do hackneyed experiments, but labs where I’d break my students up into groups to come up with experimental designs to answer questions, and figure out how to eliminate variables–just on paper. Maybe once a month or so, if the district could afford it, we’d do the best experiment the kids had come up with in real life as a class. If I’d teach a unit on evolution/intelligent-design, the lab section would only be to illustrate that some questions aren’t scientifically answerable.

It irritates me when newspaper articles say things like, “scientists think XYZ.” I don’t care what scientists think since many of them are agenda-driven bullshitters. I care what results scientists get and the procedures by which they get them. Grade school science classes teach kids the conventional wisdom of what scientists think or should think, instead of teaching the kids how to do science or at least how to recognize when something is science. Kids should be taught the history of science, the evolution of theories and the ingenuity that went into creating careful experiments to test them. They should be brought up into the culture of science, they should know what ideas have been rejected and why they were discarded. So in a sense, I think kids should be taught alchemy. They should learn about horrific scientific theories like Eugenics (at older ages). But most importantly, they should be taught how to construct their own precise experiments to answer questions they have, and to recognize when someone purporting to be a scientist has failed to do so. I think this would be more interesting for the kids, and they’d learn a great deal more than they do being told what scientists think.

Rev. Sensing briefly considers whether strangelets took out a tank in Iraq two years ago.

I’d never heard of Strangelets, but apparently they’re tiny, super-dense particles that zip through the universe at about a million miles per hour. One hit Antartica in 1993 and blew through the other side of the planet, exiting through the Indian Ocean.

That’s pretty mind-boggling. I imagine a Strangelet Storm would be a bad thing to be in the middle of. Since this is the first I’ve heard of them, I don’t know whether they can form storms, or whether they have some property that repels them from each other.

A massive storm rolled through the St. Louis area this past weekend and knocked power out to a quarter million households. My mom’s power went out Saturday and is still out, I’m told. K-Dog’s power was out long enough to kill his coral and two of his fish.

I saw this on the Bernie’s Pressbox Forum and had a laugh:

It’s frustrating that the Show Me State has a serious power outage. But enough about the Kansas City Royals.

That’s pretty doggone funny.

You heard it here first!!!

Eeeeem wom wu wom wom wmmmmrrrmroooooo!!!

I could listen to that all day!

After stopping at a gas station for a cup of coffee on my walk to work, I noticed that gas has reached $2.76 per gallon here. That’s more expensive than milk.

What the fuck happened to fucking Prairie fucking Biker‘s fucking interview?

(Kiyoshi Martinez links to the WILL’s piece on a bunch of bloggers drinking beer together like civilized folk.)

FUCKIN’ SHIT!!!

I recently created a page on my main website for tools and scripts, and plan to dump stuff in there as I use or create them. None of them would likely be of much use to anyone who reads this here page, but might help out some poor sap googling up some help down the road.

On Sunday, Cassandra and I went down to Vandalia to leap from a perfectly good airplane. It was her first time jumping and she really, really enjoyed it. She made her first static-line jump from 3,500 feet and did a fantastic job. Her first landing was much prettier then mine, landing solidly on her feet. I’d described it as stepping off an escalator, she thought it was more like jumping down from a curb. My first jump was in pretty strong wind, and I fell over and was dragged a bit. Second landing went the same way. My jump on Saturday was my second of two five-second freefalls from 4,500 feet, the next one will be a ten second freefall from a higher altitude. Although it wasn’t my best jump as far as body position and control went, it was the most fun I’ve had on a jump. There was fairly thick cloud cover starting at 2,000 feet, so when I jumped and had my freefall, I was above the clouds, and my canopy ride down was through the thin spot in the clouds where I’d jumped. It was amazingly beautiful. I couldn’t be more proud of Cass for overcoming her intense fear of falling in a big, big way. We’re going again the weekend after next!

Today is National Navajo Code Talker Day, as established by Ronald Reagan in 1982.

I learned this last night while reading the chapter on the Najavo code in WWII in Simon Singh’s excellent book, The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography. I also recently read a fiction book by Timothy Zahn called Spinneret. It’s a short, engrossing story of mankind’s first attempt at colonizing another star system.

I got about a half hour out of Champaign when I realized I’d forgotten my jump log, and so turned around and gave up. I’ll go down to Vandalia tomorrow for my seventh and Cass’s first jump. I’m hoping a tremendously petite person is available to do a jump at around 4500 feet. That way Cass can jump out first at 3500 and I can sit in the middle without the balance being thrown off too much.

Carp won today. It was pretty impressive. Tomorrow should hold a decent pitcher’s duel. I expect Prior to be in his best form, which is pretty damned impressive.

But all I really wanted to post about was the CFB I saw the other night. It’s a hostile term, but I didn’t invent it. I saw a gal out last night in a pink Johnny Damon jersey tee. I had a laugh, and thought–quite naturally–of this hilarious post. It had been linked on Cardnilly a while back, but I couldn’t find it there, and had to resort to googling this query string. If she notices she’s the top google hit for that query, I imagine she might yank the post in a fit of righteous shame. So check it out while you can.

For the second season in a row, the Bears will be without top QB Rex Grossman for much of the season after breaking his ankle during last night’s game versus the Lambs. His replacement will be former Cardinal pitching prospect Chad Hutchinson. Although he’s not listed on their roster, there’s a chance this player, who ought to be familiar with the Bears’ offensive scheme, could play a few games for them with Grossman out.

I wrote a fairly long post the other day speculating on what caused a skydiver to die at the Free Fall Convention last Saturday. While I was getting my hair cut at King’s just now, I saw on the TV that another skydiver died at the convention.

There’s no information on what happened or how experienced the jumper was, other than that it wasn’t his first jump.

I’m still gonna go make jump #7 this weekend, though.

Also, on the way back to work from the barbershop, I heard that archaeologists (actually sewer workers) discovered the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, which is mighty excitey.

Off to watch the Relentless Redbirds take on the Bouncy Baby Bears.

If the Cards win today, the Cubs will drop to 20 games behind us. If we sweep the series, the Cards’ll be 77-41, five games within the gold standard of 2X+.500!

My optimism is tempered, however. The next three games will all be played at 1 in the afternoon, and the Cards don’t tend to play so well in the daytime… Yesterday’s outstanding performance by the B-Team notwithstanding. Cardnilly’s conjuring up an Amazing Intermittently Updating Series Preview. In his comments, Andy predicts a 3-4 series win for the Cards. I’d be tickled pink to see that, although it’s not at all expected. If Neifi Perez hits another grand slam, I will literally eat my hat, though. The stinky one I wear for yard work.

Speaking of yard work, the friggin’ city’s got another crew doing my neighbors’ chores again today. Urbana is rapidly morphing into a giant condo complex, with the custodial office located at city hall.

Tonight was the great Champaign-Urbana Blogger Meet-Up, organized by Kiyoshi Martinez. It was a pretty good time. WCIA and WILL sent some poor saps out to interview us, and they seemed disappointed that what they found was a group of people drinking booze on a bar patio instead of engaging in some political-angst-fueled mudwrestling. That’s an uncharitable assessment, both seemed like swell fellows. I declined to be interviewed. The local bloggers who showed up, 9 of them if memory serves, were all swell people. One of them is having a fun post-meet-up discussion that at last check revolved around boobs with stray-facing nipples–whether to term them cross-eyed or stray-eyed. Funny shit. Highlight of the evening, as far as I’m concerned: someone was moving out of an apartment across the street from the bar, and they’d left a toilet sitting on the street. I moved the toilet so that it would be under a sign that read: ABSOLUTELY NO DUMPING. It was an obvious thing to do, but that doesn’t take away from the joy of having done it.

Anthony Reyes made his major league debut tonight, and kicked some ass. lboros complained before the game about the lineup. I’d heard that Edmonds and Nunez wouldn’t be starting, and thought that a good thing to give them some rest. To bring up Reyes, we’d have to send someone down and the obvious choices would be John Gall or Scott Seabol. Facing a lefthander and with Nunez resting, we’d have to put either Mabry (a lefty) at third or else Seabol. So Gall was sent down and Seabol retained and plugged into 3rd base. Unfortunately, Seabol went 0-3 with two strikeouts and 4 LOB before Nunez came in to replace him. When Anthony Reyes is removed from the active roster tomorrow, he’ll be replaced by Skip Schumaker, an excellent move which gives us three legitimate center fielders and two viable lead-off men, so that Eckstein can get some time off, too.

So, to sum up: Blogger Meet-Up/Bash was a good time, Cards won 8-4, and wise roster moves were made.

I got this email from my sister, who I’ll be visiting the weekend after next:

Oh, I forgot to tell you, Colin has decided to call you “Lee Lee” for the time being. He cannot say “Uncle” yet, but when we have told him that you are coming to visit he gets excited and says “LEE LEE” over and over again. I must say this is quite the honor, as he has only named two other people, Mom–Grandma (Gi Gi or Ga Ma) and Chris’ mom–Grammy (Ga Me)…

See you soon!

LEE LEE will do for now. I was hoping for Unkie Weeum, though.
That little note will put a smile on a fella’s face though.

(Please excuse the hostile and abusive title to this post.)

On Saturday afternoon at around 3:00pm, Cassandra and I drove up to Rantoul to check out the World Freefall Convention. There were maybe (but no more than) 60 spectators there, and flocks of skydivers would appear in the sky every ten minutes or so and land over by the small city of tents where the skydivers were convening. An artificial pond had been constructed for “swooping,” and we saw one or two people perform swoops on it. Swooping is when you come in fast, usually spiralling down to pick up speed, and then pull up just before you get to the water so that you fly horizontally over the pond. If you do it right, you can drag a foot behind you and create a rooster tail behind you. Here’s a good picture of someone performing a swoop. Here’s the webpage for Swooping.net. It looks cool, but I wouldn’t do it. There wasn’t all that much to see… skydiving isn’t exactly a spectator sport. We ate some shaved ice and Cass talked to some people about what sorts of things there were to see, they said the HALO jumps and swooping was over with by 7am. So we ate our shaved ice, watched some people make very good landings and a few people land ugly, then drove back home, listening to the Braves finish up their brutal whipping the Cardinals.

To say the least, I was surprised to see on the news that an experienced skydiver had died there earlier in the day. LBOTP wrote a link-filled post on the tragic event yesterday (remember: use Bugmenot for registration information). The convention in Rantoul, and their dropzone in general, doesn’t have the best of reputations for safety. Three jumpers have died there in the past three years. To my knowledge, nobody has ever died or been seriously injured at the dropzone I go to, and their reputation is very good (thus being the official dropzone for the Falling Illini). That being said, I consider LBOTP’s and her commenters’ criticisms of Rantoul for hosting the convention to be a bit harsh. I don’t imagine Rantoul pulls in much tourism dollars with the convention, seeing as most people are sleeping in tents or RVs on the grounds of the Chanute air force base. I think Rantoul’s done an admirable job putting the base to use since its closing. And skydiving is a whole lot of fun, even in my limited experience of 5 seconds of free-fall time in six jumps (although I might be doubling that time come this weekend). I don’t consider jumping out of an airplane from over 2000 feet with two parachutes strapped to your back to be a particularly dangerous thing to do. Bungee jumping looks a whole lot more dangerous to me, just because you’re more dependent other peoples’ competence with that. Hell, I’m more nervous being a passenger in a car when my mom’s driving than I am when the airplane door opens up and it’s time to hop out.

So I’m pretty confused about how this obviously competent skydiver with over 1,500 jumps in his logs could have failed to land safely. The news reports are inconsisent. First, the article from the Miami Herald, his hometown paper:

Gerrits’ parachute may have gotten twisted or tangled after he jumped out of an airplane shortly before noon Saturday. He cut it loose, but by then he was too close to the ground for the reserve parachute to open, said Duane Northrup, coroner for Champaign County.

”If you’re tangled in your main chute, you may not be descending at a fast enough rate to trigger the reserve chute,” said Northrup. “We don’t know if that’s what happened, but he was having some kind of difficulty with his parachute.”

So it sounds like he jumped out and accidentally deployed his parachute too early, it didn’t open properly, but opened enough to slow him down too much for his AAD to cut away his main and pop out the reserve at 1000 feet, while not enough to give him control over his descent. Sounds weird to me, since I’d imagine such an accomplished jumper would be able to handle that sort of situation. Unless he was somehow thoroughly bound up by his deployed, unopened parachute. If enough of his parachute was wrapped around him to render his arms useless, there wouldn’t seem to be enough parachute left to slow him down to keep the AAD from doing its job.

Now the News-Gazette article, which is the same as the Chicago Tribune article:

“The chute did open, but there were some problems during deployment of the chute and he essentially ran out of time,” said Bill Fabian, chief deputy coroner for Champaign County.
The reserve chute also was deployed, he said.
…
Beth Mahlo, director of public relations for the convention, said Mr. Gerrits may have experienced what is called a spinning malfunction. This is when sky divers spin at a high rate of speed, become unaware of their altitude and deploy their chutes too late.

In this story, the reserve is deployed too, which could have resulted in a downplane malfunction, in which both his main and reserve would be flying rapidly downwards into the ground, spinning around with him as the axis. Here’s a picture of a couple of SEALs performing one on purpose, the crazy bastards. I suppose if the lines of the two parachutes were twisted around one another, they very well may have prevented him from doing anything about it. That would have to be a very rare malfunction, though.

In any case, the city of Rantoul can’t be considered heartless or greedy for having the facilities and the generosity to host the convention just because a rare accident happened that took a man’s life.

The Cards are in the middle of a hot, sticky August where we’ve only got one day of rest. According to this article, Tony La Russa plans to use a sixth starter for a turn of the rotation to get each pitcher an extra day’s rest. Marquis could probably use two extra days. The sixth starter would either be a reliever, probably Al Reyes; or a call-up from Memphis. The article suggests that would be Kevin Jarvis, who’s pitched very well in Memphis after pitching horribly for St. Louis, including this game in which he stole defeat from the jaws of victory with the help of Hee Seop Choi.

I’d rather see someone brought up than have to work someone hard out of the bullpen (although if anyone from the bp, I’d like to see Brad Thompson get the nod). Obviously, the idea of bringing up Jarvis has little appeal to me. lboros likes the idea of bringing up Anthony Reyes to make him post-season eligible. I wouldn’t mind seeing Gissell come up. A Pulsipher call-up would make a lot of fans happy, no doubt.

Update: Heard on the radio just now that it’s Anthony Reyes. He’s in uniform and took BP, but can’t sit in the dugout until he is officially activated. That’ll happen tomorrow, when he takes the mound against Doug Davis. It should be an exciting game. Might have to slip away from tomorrow’s Blogger Meet-Up a bit early to watch it (6pm at Mike n’ Mollie’s). Bloggers and blog readers are all invited.

The Cards had been shutout for 15 2/3 innings until Pujols’s homer in the eighth. Izzy gave up a run in the ninth to make the score 3-1. Nunez and the Gooch pop base hits up the middle and Luna reaches as So avoids a misguided tag attempt by Giles to load the bases with no outs in the ninth. Seabol pops out after fouling a few inside pitches off and retreats down the clubhouse tunnel in disgust. Up comes David Eckstein, who takes a ball then smokes–SMOKES–a ball into the left field seats for a walk-off Grand Slam. Cards win 5-3 and secure their 70th win. Chris Carpenter is no doubt pleased as punch with that, although he missed out on his 17th win.

The WB cameras were keeping a close eye on Pujols, who had been leading the cheer from the dugout steps in the ninth. When Eckstein jacked his game-winner, he was leaping around the on-deck circle and led the charge to greet all the runners arrive at the plate. Great team leader. And he’s signed through 2010!

That was a great game, a huge win. I hope it’s the start of a nice winning run, gaining momentum as key players return with the playoffs and cool weather looming a few months ahead.

(Just a note of ignorance: the players were wearing yellow armbands. What was that all about? Some kind of day-late salute to Little Boy? Friendship Day? A very late Tour de Lance commemoration?)

Update: 2/3 2BB 4RBI. Slump Slain.

‘nother Update: “During Sunday’s game, players wore gold wristbands and a gold ribbon decal on their jerseys to symbolize the 2005 Commissioner’s Initiative For Kids. The Initiative is a fundraiser for underprivileged youth. Ameriquest and Major League Baseball have distributed more than one million tickets (combined) to each team for select games. The tickets are sold to the public for $1 and distributed to local youth.”
– Thanks to StLCardinals.com

Today’s Cards game wasn’t televised. The local FOX affiliate had to choose between Cubs v. Mets or Cards v. Braves. Maddux was the Cubs pitcher; and the Cards had the plummetting (Cards are 1-10 in his last ten starts) Jason Marquis take the mound.

Fortunately, the Cubs lost too; and the ‘stros are heading that way down by four against the Giants.

Tomorrow, we’ve got Chris Carpenter taking the mound against a scary Atlanta youngster for his chance to get his 17th win and to give the Cardinals their 70th.