Somusing

I came across the term aqua regia while reading, and looked it up. Wikipedia says the term is from Latin for “royal water”, and is also known as aqua regis (Latin, “king’s water”). In modern chemistry it’s known as nitro-hydrochloric acid. It got its name “because it can dissolve the noble metals gold and platinum.” A great story is related there: When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. Af...

Václav Havel, Washington, April 9, 2005 Yesterday I watched the pope’s [John Paul II] funeral on television. It was a grand and moving spectacle. I knew the pope, and I’d even dare say that we were friends, and perhaps for that very reason I was incapable of experiencing any great sorrow at his death. The thing is, I had a visceral feeling that, with great peace in his soul, he was departing for a place he knew he was going to, a good place. But America is a rather odd country. It’s very religious, and at the same time it allows the broadcast of the pope’s funeral to be interrupted by advertisements, many of which were the direct embodiment of what he had criticized for his entire life. I found it truly hard to understand, and it made me more and more uncomfortable, until I finally switched the television off. To the Castle and Back , Václav Havel, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, 2007, p. 20

For my Uncle Howard, here are pictures of some of the plentiful graffiti in and on the long-abandoned building on top of one of Plovdiv's main hills, Taksim Tepe. The building looks like it might have been some kind of state-owned community center during the Communist era. Look! Mira's name! In front of the wall is the top of the rock mountain, left as part of the room.

I was surprised the other day to come across an informative six-part series in the Huffington Post about police reform and the drug war focused on Salt Lake City. I had not heard about several of the cases mentioned. The articles are by Radley Balko, former editor of Reason magazine and analyst at the Cato Institute, among other things. I think it's good that these look above the level of a single "news story" and show the bigger picture. Here are links to each of the articles, and a note about the main person featured: How A Drug Raid Gone Wrong Sparked A Call For Change In The Unlikeliest State In The Nation (Matthew David Stewart) As The Drug War Escalates, SWAT Teams Become 'Bullies With Badges And Guns' (William "Dub" Lawrence) Meet The Activist Who's Bringing Conservatives On Board The Police Reform Movement (Connor Boyack) An Occupy Activist's New Cause: Drug Raids And Police Abuse (Jesse Fruhwirth) An Unexpected Reformer ...

It's been interesting learning to balance Vacation Life with Regular Life. Normally when you visit a place, you're there for only a short time, so you pack in as much stuff as possible. For us, that means visiting historical sights and museums, walking miles and miles around a city, eating out, etc. Our Vacation Life speed is actually pretty relaxed, as we've learned that with our large family, it's better to lower expectations than to push ourselves too hard and end up exhausted, cranky, and ready to kill each other. I'm a big fan of lowering expectations! But even with our comparatively relaxed Vacation Speed, we still get tired and it can be quite expensive. It's not a sustainable way to live for more than a few days at a time. So for our Home School Field Trip, we balance the Travel/Sight-Seeing/Culture Days with days of Regular Life. Gittin' history at Scarborough Castle: Until fairly recently, a Regular Life day consisted of the kids doing sch...

A few weeks ago, while I was in York by myself (Mom's day off!), I met an interesting man named Trevor Morris, originally from Wales, who does amazing photography that shows the phosphorescence of certain minerals. If I understand it correctly, he takes the photos in the first few milliseconds after turning off the light in a room -- he built his own device that does this-- and the camera captures what the human eye can't see. BBC did an article about him some years ago. And here's a link to a slideshow of some of his photos . Pretty cool! American readers might notice the references to "NY" on the website. That's North Yorkshire, not New York! :)

It really depressed me to read the following in the Wikipedia article on Henry David Thoreau's book Walden : The National Endowment for the Arts in 2012 bestowed the University of Southern California with a $40,000 grant to create, based on the book, an online video game in which players "will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods." Why? The obvious frivolity, the source of the funds, the likely insufficiency of those funds to complete the game, and of course above all the idea that a video game could be anything but the exact opposite of the right environment in which to learn any lessons of a Walden-like life experiment. Oh, and get off my lawn! It'd be a lot cheaper and nicely mind-expanding to read and contemplate Walden , and if some modern technology is needed to spruce up the experience, listen to and study the mind-boggling Georgio Moroder's Knights in White Satin disco remake...

It's always exciting when the kids get to drink a carbonated beverage. Today it inspired Mira to do a spontaneous 7-up ad:

My hopes for a sunny, flower-filled Easter have been dashed -- it's cold and windy and might even snow -- but here is our indoor Spring surprise: I'm not very knowledgeable about plants, so I had no idea that this long, straight plant with not very many big leaves would suddenly bloom. We noticed the unopened bloom Friday night, and Saturday morning, there it was. It's really big! Mom, do you know what it is? It's so pretty and I feel like Spring has at least arrived inside our apartment! What a lovely gift for us.

It’s hard not to be at least a little paranoid when I come across all the following articles in a single day not of concerted search on the subject, but simply following a few links I came across on Twitter: The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) by James Bamford, longtime NSA watcher — I guess Utah is supposed to thank Orrin Hatch for bringing in some new jobs! Jobs and money über alles. Democratic Senators Issue Strong Warning About Use of the Patriot Act — Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall say they are “skeptical about the actual value of the ‘intelligence collection operation’” where even the rules surrounding it are secret. RIAA chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 1 — Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and other Internet providers plan to monitor customers’ Internet traffic and issue warnings if in their opinion any copyright is violated, absent any legal requirement or framework. How Not to Attract Tourist...

Jon and I have been libertarians forever, but we didn't really know what to call it until we found and bought a copy of  Liberty  magazine at Barnes & Noble many years ago. Well, Jon was an anarchist in high school, and he still sometimes borders on that; I think I've always been a libertarian. Liberty  became the only magazine we subscribed to without interruption, until they stopped making the print edition a year or so ago. There were times when that magazine was like a cozy, cuddly blanket for me, even though much of what appeared in it was argumentative, sarcastic, sometimes pessimistic. Even our friend Brian , who is not known for his sunniness, found  Liberty  too caustic when we tried to indoctrinate him with it. But I loved it. So did Jon. We still  read it online , but I do miss the print version. Anyway, my point is that many times over the years, Jon and I saw ads for various libertarian conferences and one of us would always say, "We should go to that ...

Over the 4th of July weekend, I took my kids to the Huntsman Springs event in Driggs. It's in its second year, but this was the first time they had an all-day carnival type of thing going on during the day. Face-painting, bouncy houses, various kinds of entertainment (of which I only saw the air show, which was cool). All free, except for the food vendors. (True to form, I bought the kids one funnel cake and one cup of honey lemonade to share; I'm cheap. Also, I wouldn't let the kids do anything that required standing in a long line. I'm cheap and mean!) It was really a great event, but we couldn't stay long because of other obligations we had that day. On our way out, we bumped into this guy: Okay, we didn't literally bump into Glenn Beck. (Although I did nearly bump into one of the security guys who was creating a space around him as he walked along.) But we were pretty close for a few minutes. In the above photo, he's sitting in the real Herbie, ...

I finally finished the sweater I designed and made for Jon, and here it is: Jon is a programmer, user, fan, and proponent of free software (similar to open-source software), hence the "free as in freedom." I don't know if the phrase is the official tagline of the Free Software Foundation , but it's the title of a biography of Richard Stallman , the father of the free software movement, and it describes what is meant by "free software." Anyway, I wanted Jon's sweater (the first I've made for him) to be unique to him, and this is what we came up with. It looks good on him, right? :)

I just read an article called Why I don't care very much about tablets anymore , and while I don't have a tablet, and think the author's overall point is weak (not being very excited about tablets, yet still planning to always have one), this part resonated with me: "Some of the really savvy new media efforts like Flipboard are exciting, but after the initial "wow" factor wears off, these apps mainly serve to remind me that there's already too much good stuff to read out there, and that my life is slipping away from me in an infinite stream of interesting bits about smart animals, dumb criminals, outrageous celebs, shiny objects, funny memes, scientific discoveries, economic developments, etc. I invariably end up closing the app in a fit of guilt, and picking up one of the truly fantastic dead tree or Kindle books that I'm working my way through at the moment, so that I can actually exercise my brain (as opposed to simply wearing it out)." Th...

So, my mom wanted me to write about this on here. Yeah. Anyways, I went to a camp at BYU called Startalk that was really awesome. It was a 3-week long Arabic language camp equivalent to a year of high school Arabic or a semester of college Arabic. It was really cool. There were about 27 students, I think, and they had us stay at the Heritage Halls dorms there. So our days went like this usually: wake up at 8 or so, get dressed and stuff. then we had class from 8:30 to 11:30. After that we had lunch at the Canon Center. At 1:00 we had class again until 3:00. Then it was Language Lab until 4:00, in which we did homework and DVD stuff. After that, we had Language Recreation for another hour. That was playing games with Arabic words and stuff. Then we had dinner, which was made by our counselors. Then Fun With Arabic, which was like soccer and stuff until 7:30. After that we had Study Hall (oh joy!) for TWO WHOLE HOURS until bed. We had a TON of homework. But I'm not complaining! We...

I've given this recipe to a lot of people, so I decided to do a post about it, so I can just refer to it in the future. Although it occurs to me that I haven't verified that the people to whom I've given the recipe actually like it. But whatever. It works for me, so here it is: 6 cups whole wheat flour (or 5 cups whole wheat flour and 1 cup white flour or any combination you desire) 2 1/2 teaspoons salt 2 1/4 teaspoon yeast (one package, if you're buying those little packages) 2 1/2 cups water (about 110°, like a pretty warm bath) about 2 tablespoons oil (vegetable or olive oil or whatever) 2 to 4 tablespoons honey (I don't like bread overly sweet, so I stick to the lower amount. I think. I don't usually measure) Mix all the dry ingredients in a stand mixer. (I have a Kitchenaid and use the dough hook for this bread, although I usually mix the dry ingredients with a wooden spoon first. Also, I almost never proof my yeast. I've never had it f...

Beware of many knitting details below. For Christmas, I got to give to my brother Colter, who is an artist and musician and one of the coolest people I know. He's interested in found objects and has created a lot of art using stuff he's found, whether it's someone's grocery list or a cardboard box or whatever. So I decided to knit him a sweater vest from already-used yarn. Ideally, I would have found some old sweater at a thrift shop, unraveled it and used that yarn, and I did try to do that. But the first sweater I found had been washed too many times or something and the yarn broke really easily. So my next best idea was to use yarn that I had knitted into part of a baby blanket about six years ago. Here's the beginning of Colter's sweater (on the left) next to a couple of panels of the blanket (on the right) before I unraveled them: There's nothing quite like unraveling something you've knitted. You just pull and everything comes apart one...

Zed's 14th birthday was in January. Here he is wearing the hat I knitted for him: If all our plans work out, he'll be moving out in about 3 1/2 years. That is just crazy.

Lillian and Mira have apparently formed a "club" or something, where their names are Millian and Lira (cute, huh?). There have been some conflicts between them, which makes the "club" a somewhat delicate topic. So today, Jon and I were talking to Mira and suggesting that Millian and Lira was a great idea! "You can be a rock band!" I said to Mira. (Band names are a big topic of conversation around here.) "No!" Mira said, refusing to be flattered. "You could be a dance team!" I said. "No! I would just dance suckily!" And then she burst into tears as Jon and I laughed. We tried to explain her superior use of adverb, but she was just in the mood to cry today, so that's what happened. At least she didn't cry suckily.