Just a Reminder

i don't like to blatently steal by reposting work by hard working artists etc... but this comic has a such good reminder that i am. sometimes i lament having a cat that is reproductionless because i think about how nice kittens are. but i must remember that there are far to many cats that need a home to want kittens of my own.

Femto

i love our kitty. she is nice without being overbearing. it is a treat when she curls up on you to get some pets. there is nothing quite so complementary and warm as femto snuggling in on a cold evening.

I Can Paint

okay i can only kinda paint something... but you can see my painting/watch me paint my beautiful (uhh ya) picture here. make your own at art.com.

Not Quite Right

seems that someone in environmental health and safety here was having fun when they put up the new log in for waste forms (waste as in chemical reaction waste, spent batteries, mercury lightbulbs, lab trash, sharps... not normal human waste).

i'm not exactly sure what they were trying to go for there... but to me it looks like a bathroom sign or maybe a pregnancy test for boy or girl...

One Way to be a Loser

stop someone's NMR experiment before their time is up and then not even be able to speak/understand english enough to communicate about what you did when you stopped it.

Eat Cheddar and Call Me in the Morning.

apparently cheese consumption before bedtime can determine your types of dreams. listen to the story at npr.org.

Onions! with Onions

the food selection on campus has shrunk for me. the imitation taco bell here doesn't serve their "veggie burrito" (think 7 layer) this year. the veggie burger has been really not so good the last two times i have gotten it. and today i was just trying to order a little tiny variation on the bean burrito. i wanted it with onions. now the imitation taco bell serves their bean burrito with the following ingredients: flour tortilla, beans, monterrey jack cheese. no red sauce, no onions. there is a salsa/hot sauce thing that you can add after. quite good, but quite hot. so today i wanted a bean burrito with onions... the lady didn't understand english and so i thought she understood my order but instead she made a beef burrito. i noticed the packaging wasn't the bean burrito color and so i asked again, "BEAN burrito??" the poor lady (i'm not really mad at her, more so the people who hired her) pretty well abandoned me at this point. another lady working back there, straightened it out and i got my burrito with onions. so for the days i don't bring a lunch and i don't want to leave campus. my known options are:
mexican: bean burrito, rice, beans, chips & nacho cheese
asian: stir fried rice
sandwich: veggie sandwich or wrap more expensive than it should be
not so good american: french fries, garden burger, way too cheesey pizza (2 varieties), bread sticks
looks like i shouldn't forget a lunch

Surprise Book

i'm reading The United States of Europe by T.R. Reid. i've seen it sitting on the library book self a few times and it has shown up in my reccomended area of amazon. what finally convinced me that i should read it was the radio show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me... from NPR. one week they featured the author, Reid, as their 'not my job' guest. the host, or someone on the show, made the comment that the book was actually a page turner. which is a real accomplishment for a political non-fiction book. i thought he was making a joke, but the host said, "no really, it is a good book." so when i saw it in the library last week i picked it up. thus far it is very interesting and not like reading a high school civics book (yawn!)

at lunch i read this gem of a paragraph.

Sill, the Welch years weren't good for everybody at GE. He was ruthless about cutting jobs—well over 100,000 people were forced to leave GE in his first decade at the top. The press , in turn, was ruthless in reporting on the mass layoffs he engineered. For years, a man who loved the limelight couldn't stand to read his press clippings. The media kept bringing up all those layoffs. Somewhere along the line, Welch acquired a nickname he absolutely loathed: "Neutron Jack," after the bomb that kills humans by the thousands but leaves the building standing. Even those who survived at Neutron Jack's GE spent their careers under intense pressure; one union leader observed that Welch "squeezes his people dry, like lemons."

Whaling

if you don't like what you have to eat, use it to catch something different. at least that is what i learned from this whale.

Hearing

i subscribe to a newsletter from occupationalhazards.com because it has some good safety information that i'm not aware of every now and again. this week there was a blurb from a company about radio headsets. i thought it was interesting so here it is.

When headset radios first appeared in stores several decades ago, they were not marketed as hearing protectors – a good thing, since they offered very little attenuation of noise. At some frequencies, the headsets were even found to amplify background noise (with the radio turned off) due to resonance in the earcup. To be a hearing protector, an earmuff must be designed to be a hearing protector from the start.

The volume settings of typical portable stereo headsets have been measured at 81 dBA at 50 percent volume setting, 91 dBA at 75 percent volume, and 96 dBA at 100 percent volume--a hazardous noise level if listened to continuously for several hours. Ideally, a radio headset should allow the enjoyment of music at safe levels, but also reduce the background disturbance in a noisy environment.

Today's new hearing protectors do just that: built-in radios contain circuitry that limits their maximum radio volume. When the radio is turned on, the sound output is electronically limited to 82 dB. The noise level of the radio will certainly fluctuate (even though there is an 82 dB peak cutoff in the circuitry, the average noise level of the signal may be much lower). But for the sake of the following example, let's just assume the worst-case radio noise--a constant noise level of 82 dB from the radio worn in a noise environment of 90, 100 and 105 dB.

When two noise sources are added together, the decibels are added logarithmically, not arithmetically. This means that the sum of two identical sound sources (90 dB + 90 dB) would sum to equal 93 dB. Using a logarithmic calculator, let's determine the effective exposure for 90, 100 and 105 dB of environmental noise, with an assumed 20 dB of attenuation from the earmuff, and constant radio signal of 82 dB:

Total Effective Exposure for a Radio Earmuff Worn in 90, 100 and 105 dB of Noise

Noise Level	90dB		100dB		105dB
Attenuation	-20dB		-20dB		-20dB
Passive Exposure	70dB		80dB		85dB
Plus Radio Noise	+82dB		+82dB		+82dB
Effective Exposure	82dB		84dB		87dB

Since the radio output is limited to a safe 82 dB maximum, the radio adds very little noise to effective exposures in high noise levels. In a high-noise job that is also repetitive or monotonous, a radio earmuff can add significantly to worker satisfaction and enjoyment, without sacrificing hearing protection.

Brad Witt, MA, CCC-A, is audiology and regulatory affairs manager for Bacou-Dalloz Hearing Safety Group.