Snowball In The Sun

The Judge Of That

This morning when I left for work, Comfrey and Carnaby bolted outside and, since herding cats is not good for one's ego, I let them be. I went home at lunch, and the fat one reamed me out because did I know it was +30 and he needs to go inside where it's cool?

Then Comfrey ambled over, and showed me that his right eye wouldn't open; it was closed in a hard wink, and he did not want to talk to me about how it happened. Cat fight. I took Comfrey in my truck down to the vet's office, and eschewed the cat carrier I should have had him in. He was hysterical the entire way, screaming, growling and roaming freely around the truck cab. On 8th street, in busy traffic, he launched himself over me and got stuck in behind my brake and gas pedals.

We were approaching an orange light, and his entire body was keeping me from braking or speeding up. I careened diagonally through the intersection to a side street and pulled him out from my feet by grabbing onto his ear or his eyelid or something, and flung him in the back.

This is not a video of the debacle, but you must watch it anyway.

Boob Punching

I think I'd be remiss in not posting this in time for the long weekend. Mind you, I already have a gold medal in this (speed bag division) but for anyone new to it, here is the glorious nutshell.

Idolaturd

I never feel more Canadian, and by "Canadian", I mean "acutely aware of our collective awkwardness", than when I stumble across Canadian Idol on summer television. It's so bad, so low budget, such a cross-eyed cousin of something that in itself is pretty horrid. At least American Idol seems like professionals, albeit cheesy ones, produce it, as opposed to this podunk horseshit, which is apparently staged on Dini Petty's old set. And these kids, Jesus. Awful. It makes me miss the days of Sun Country on CTV Saturday afternoons...don't look at me like that.

The chubby gay kid from Newfoundland is butchering the living hell out of Heart's "Alone". Umm, really?  I mean, I know his mom thought he *nailed* it that time he sang it for the ladies at bingo, but somehow it didn't translate. And, in order to keep their lucrative Subway cup placement deal, the judges have to act like it was real music, like someone will deserve a record deal after the baddest ones are whittled away. And Ben Mulroney has to mention his fiance in every other sentence- which makes me think someone finally got a clear phone picture of him in a Denny's mens room cavorting with a big leather daddy and poor blackmailed Mila has had to buy the mannequin boy a bride, stat.

The Heart song is now over and they're not throwing pies at him. From the block-head judge who looks like an ex-wrestler with Prada glasses, "Sass and I both commented we 'got chills'". Oh I am so God damned sure you both did. Mind you, I got chills as well, but that's often what happens right before I puke all over myself.

Screaming Up At Us

What's German for "Git R Done"?

The townsfolk here think Jen and I are crazy for it, but tonight we refused tickets to an event in the arena we've built...even though they were free...even though they were skybox seats...even though...it was for a monster trucks show. I trust you understand that I would rather sit naked on cold concrete than endure a spectacular spectacular like that.

Maybe it's because I would be happy to never step inside that god damn building again, no matter the occasion...unless it was to plunge down a big box marked Acme Dyno-Mite.  Maybe it's because I spent countless hours of my childhood stuck in the back seat of monster trucks, and they were usually crossing white water rivers, not crunching stacks of Buicks in man-made mud where a trade show or hockey game will replace the action in just a couple of days.

I've had a pretty busy couple of weeks up until now, though.  I was in GP last week escorting a peer safety auditor through our Alberta processes, and the man busted my balls until the very end...no seriously, it was awful-- I stayed at a Sandman Inn one night after working too late. A Sandman!  You see?  -- and it was all just fine in the end. I was sick about it for days, and he was hardly reassuring me that I had done well...and in the end, he scored us a 98%, which is even better than I score myself on alternating years. I don't know how he came to that, but I'll take it. 

When I was finished with that, I went and got some really cool silk flowers, big red and orange things, to take out to the Webster Cemetery. We got my mom a headstone for Mother's Day and it had been installed just a couple days earlier.  It was really strange driving out there...almost two years to the day since it all happened. The closer I got to the graveyard, the more I wished it was still further away. I listened to "Tomorrow, Wendy" by Concrete Blonde about nine times on the car stereo, and somehow it made me feel ready to be there. I've loved that song madly for years, but now it finally means something specific to me.  

It fittingly started to pour rain right as I got there. I tried to take a couple of pictures of the headstone, and a couple of them actually turned out alright despite all the rain. One sucky part is that the inscription I'd had them carve into the back of the stone is nearly impossible to see because her grave backs right up against the back fence of the cemetery. I may move the fence with my car; the quote is really sweet and it's important that people who go to her grave can see it. That, or I'll just write "OVER" in the lower right hand corner of the headstone and hope they know there's more to see. 

When I had enough cemetarying, I drove onto the highway and started back toward Dawson, taking a different way than I usually do.  When I got close to Rycroft, a little yellow car came flying off a dirt road, through its stop sign and hit the highway, almost hitting the oncoming cars head on. The car in front, the one he missed by centimeters, pulled off the road in shock, and the yellow car was now in my lane, ahead of me. He was weaving from one side of the highway to the other, and sometimes straddling the yellow centre line, driving the same way a really drunk person would walk. 

I pulled around past him, and we shared a horrid good look at one another. He was disgusting, and he was visibly hammered. I called the cops, told them he'd be entering Rycroft in about 2 minutes...he'd be the yellow car going 20 km/hr down the wrong side of the road.  The car disappeared down a side road and by the time I circled back to follow him, he'd gone into any number of shanty streets. The cops and I met up, and we all drove around looking for him.  Soon, the police called me, they'd found him and the car (which belonged to his girlfriend, lucky lady), he was well known to them, and completely drunk. They took him to jail, and I went on home. By the end of the day, they asked if I'd go and point him out in court and possibly tell the story over again, since they never did hear from the girl he almost hit. Damn. I said yes, because they said that without my testimony he might get let off for lack of evidence, but damn.  I am really hoping whatever broke down girlfriend goes to court to support him is too stupid to write down my name after I'm called, because around here, you can find anyone in half an hour.

My strategy for the court appearance is that I will wear a full Hutterite outfit, babushka, dress, weird big 80's glasses, speak in slightly broken English, and throw them off a bit. I know I can pull off Hutterite, I know I can.

Heelarious

Is it wrong that these make me want to stab someone? 

Heelarious- that's the name, and here is your link, should you want to buy some for some poor unsuspecting little girl, pet monkey, or effeminate baby boy.

Want

As if the kitten video below wasn't enough, I have now received one of those online personality surveys from another friend, and lo and behold, this was the answer to:

What was your favorite toy as a child? no idea. probably the one that looked like Christie.

This Cabbage Patch Kid thing, again, I am assuming.  Really?  Okay.  I can't say I've ever gazed into the eyes of one of those lumpy faced, yarn haired darlings and thought, "sweet Jesus, it's like looking in a mirror".  In fact, I always thought they were pretty hideous. (A full circle of subsequent, subconsious self loathing begins?)

Hideous or not, I wanted one so badly in Grade 4, during their first wave. I didn't like dolls, and that was hardly the point. There were those who had a Cabbage Patch Kid, and those who didn't, and I wasn't having it. There was some mystique around the dolls, the genius marketing behind making them individual, having birth certificates with real names on them. 

By the time I learned about them, and learned that I needed one or might actually cease living, they were impossible to get. The radio regaled stories of mothers in fist fights in department stores, and I knew that even if given the chance to scrap over a homely doll in a box, my mom wouldn't even try. She was uncaring like that; to date, she had never punched anyone out on my behalf.

One day, an idiot in my class showed up with her very own Cabbage Patch Kid. I had often considered killing her, but that day I was convinced it was time. She carried it like she was Miss Grande Prairie and the doll was her winning bouquet of roses, all morning long. I fumed in my desk.

I went home for lunch, and, launched a shameful tirade at my mom, who was stirring my chicken noodle soup.  "Even the Idiot has one now!!  I am the only person at Hillside who doesn't have a Cabbage Patch Kid, and I don't want the one Grandma got for me at SAAN, that's not a REAL one....and I stormed into the living room and threw myself on the couch. I couldn't focus on anything, the want was just too much. 

My mom wandered, condescendingly coolly into the living room behind me and said, "I can't help you. Every store has a waiting list.  You don't even like dolls"

I don't know what I replied, but I know I was screaming. She told me to smarten up, and to go down to the basement and get one of my old dolls from the storage room. I whined some more, that it wasn't about other dolls, it was about an actual, real, Cabbage Patch Kid. She flashed crazy eyes at me and said to go down to the storage room, NOW.

Livid, I stomped down the stairs, flung back the curtain covering the door to the storage room, and saw the yellow and green box I'd been dreaming of sitting on the floor. I managed not to pass out, and I picked up the box to see a red pig tailed girl Cabbage Patch Kid with a navy blue dress staring back at me. I stood there a moment, smelling the doll, its thick baby powder scent washing relief and pride over me. Whether it was the chemical scent or just pure disbelief, I wasn't sure if any of the last minute was real, and then my mom walked in behind me. 

"What's that?" she asked, smiling at me. 

"Cabbage Patch Kid"

"Will you live, now?"

"Yes"

We took her upstairs, into the kitchen and snipped her out of her plastic cuffs attaching her to the box, and I opened the adoption papers, knowing well that they were serious. I knew she'd have a perfect name, because she, and now I, was perfect.

"PHYLLIS COLLETTE"

I was crushed that she had a weird name, an old name.  No matter, I knew of a girl who had to "legally" change her doll's name, and there was a system where Xavier Roberts (sitting at his roll top desk) would make the change in the registry for you.

I didn't even eat my soup. I walked back to school, with that just-got-laid feeling I would have to wait quite a bit longer to know. I was different, and everything was right again. I didn't take Phyllis to the school with me, because I didn't want the scabby other kids pawing her, getting their smells on her. When I got to my classroom, to my surprise, I didn't tell anyone. Somehow just knowing that I got one, that my mom did whatever it took to get her and hide her in the basement on the one day short of when I couldn't stand it any longer made me proud enough. Besides, it was a doll, and I really didn't care for dolls.

...for the one who likes to rock

 

This video was sent to me today, with the words, "If you were a kitty, this would be you. It has the exact same Cabbage Patch Kid face". I watched it, and...okay, I do have flashes of recognition...it looks very much like when the Friendly Giant used to tuck me into bed. Thank you for sending it, sweet weirdo. I will endeavor to find a small animal that looks just like you.

Ark of the Hairball

The good news is...after three years, we're finally moving out of this petrified turd of a town.  We are headed back to Grande Prairie, having bought a house that seems to be meant for us. It's in the same downtown neighbourhood where we were before. Everything will be the same, except we have a few more pets, and that is my concern. 

Our current place, the acreage that overlooks Hell, is several private acres of forest and huge lawns. Our house is 2600 square feet, with plenty of room for all of us to have space and not feel crowded and overwhelmed. The new house is less than 1100 square feet. I am not sure what a small house will feel like with a Great Dane, a part time poodle, and three territorial cats in it, but I am pretty sure it will feel nuts. 

If I didn't love them all, and feel wholly honored and obligated to keeping them for their entire natural lives, I would think we should downsize the brood...but even saying that makes me feel sick and sad. What's done is done.  We are putting up cat fencing in the new backyard, angled mesh that makes it physically impossible for cats to jump over the fence, into a world of danger. That should help in the 3 1/2 months of nice weather that we have each year, but when it's cold out, it's not happening, and I will be trapped in a pile of dander, eating Claritin like Tic Tacs, hooked up to an oxygen tank until spring. Even so, I can't wait.

I told you I was a big deal

Please read this article from Nottingham University and explain it back to me. I keep falling asleep, but I know it's important, as I can only assume it's got something to do with me. I'd link to it, but I am having some insertion issues with my host Typepad.

A snowball in the sun

Atoms 10 billion times colder than the Arctic are unlocking the secrets of quantum mechanics and could lead to the next range of innovative technological devices. Now, in a major joint venture, the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham are setting up a new centre dedicated to research in the exciting area of ultracold atoms.

It was 80 years ago that Albert Einstein and the mathematical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose predicted that cooling atoms close to the lowest possible temperature, absolute zero, would drastically change their behaviour and lead to new discoveries. But the methods of cooling atomic gases down to this ultracold state have only become available within the last 20 years, mainly thanks to advancements in laser technology. During that time, the field of ultracold atoms has rapidly become one of the most exciting – and important – branches of physics, highlighted by the fact that no less than three Nobel Prizes have been awarded in relation to it in the past 10 years.

So far, few groups in the UK have entered the field of ultracold matter. But the scientific landscape’s now set to change after the launch of a new £9 million Midlands Ultracold Atom Research Centre – a joint venture between the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham. By bringing together researchers with backgrounds in atomic and solid-state physics, the centre will seize exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary research that straddles these subject boundaries. Five-year funding comes from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Science and Innovation Awards. At Nottingham, the centre is run by the School of Physics and Astronomy and it’s here that Vision meets Professor Peter Krüger, who, with Professor Kai Bongs in Birmingham, will lead the centre’s experimental programme.

Head-hunted from a leading physics group at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, Professor Krüger is currently visiting the University once a month in order to get the centre’s new laboratories up and running before he moves to Nottingham later in the year. ‘Nottingham and Birmingham are well placed to play a leading role in ultracold atoms because there is already broad expertise in nanofabrication, high-performance computing simulations of ultracold matter, and solid-state physics. This provides an ideal platform on which the new group can build.

The centre’s Visitor Programme will promote collaboration with the other UK groups and with leading institutions worldwide,’ Professor Krüger explains. ‘One of the great things about the planned interdisciplinary experiments is that they can lead to answering some really big fundamental questions.’ How does it work? Getting the atoms into such a cold state is made possible by shining a state-of-the-art laser onto a gas cloud containing around a billion atoms – usually simple alkali metals such as rubidium or lithium – which cools them to within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Once cooled, the atoms merge into a single ‘superatom’ called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Superatoms are approximately a million times larger than a normal atom and can therefore be observed directly with conventional microscopes. This has opened up a vast new scientific field, enabling scientists to study quantum-mechanical effects that are normally hidden and gain greater control over them. This, according to Professor Krüger, ‘allows us to use totally new theoretical and experimental approaches to answer long-standing physics questions and model lots of systems that were previously inaccessible to experiment. It turns out you can build ‘quantum simulators’ that let us use ultracold atoms to understand many of the situations you have in solid-state and semiconductor physics.’

Professor Krüger’s particular interest lies in not only cooling the atoms but also controlling and trapping them in a precise space. This has led to the creation of revolutionary atom chips, which resemble the traditional microchips that power our everyday electronic devices. Atom chips work by using magnets to guide ultracold atoms around tiny circuits just micrometres above the surface of the chip – a bit like a microscopic magnetic levitation train. Professor Mark Fromhold, of Nottingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, said: ‘Although the atoms are so cold, they have built in quantum heat shields whose performance is equivalent to keeping a snowball frozen at the centre of the sun.’

With colleagues in Birmingham, Professor Fromhold secured the Science and Innovation Award to set up the centre and will lead its theoretical research programme. He is particularly excited by the prospect of making realistic quantum-mechanical simulations of the ultracold systems to be studied in Professor Krüger’s atom-chip experiments.

Once developed, atom chips can be used to build high-precision sensors into the next generation of electronic devices, such as those used for navigation in underground mapping and oil prospecting – or in high-performance quantum computers. ‘The precision, sensitivity, and spatial resolution far exceeds other known techniques’, says Professor Krüger.

‘The idea is that we can bring a cloud of ultracold atoms to some unknown surface we want to probe and then use that atomic cloud to image electric and magnetic fields. This technique outperforms conventional devices and is the basis of a novel type of field microscopy with important technological applications within reach. ‘But actually one of the exciting things about ultracold atoms is that it is a new field and therefore can lead to many surprise discoveries. You see so much more going on than you would with other techniques. ‘Another area I’m interested in is quantum statistics and looking at the two types of particles: bosons, which like to be together, and fermions, which don’t, exploring the cross-over of one behaviour to the other.’

Unlocking universal secrets Ultracold atoms can also be used for modelling systems in other fields of physics. With world-changing research of an international standard taking place across The University of Nottingham, Professor Krüger is looking forward to working with other groups and conducting experiments that combine the field of ultracold atoms with areas such as semiconductor physics and nanoscience, particle physics, and even cosmology.

‘By controlling atoms and the interaction of particles we can, for example, simulate neutron stars and other things that happened at the beginning of the universe,’ he says. ‘We can even synthesize artificial systems that don’t have an equivalent in nature at all.’

There is a real sense that Professor Krüger and his yet-to-be-formed team are going to be involved in the kind of cutting-edge theoretical and experimental research that can stretch out into any number of undiscovered avenues. What groundbreaking discoveries lie just around the corner remains to be seen, but it seems that the Midlands Ultracold Atom Research Centre is ideally placed to become one of the leading international groups of its kind. Maybe there are more Nobel Prizes still to be awarded in this fascinating branch of physics.