S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 16

Evolution Messed Up!

Evolution messed up! At least with vertebrates.

Let me explain. There are two most vulnerable parts of the body: the heart and the brain. Now the heard is buried inside the chest and protected somewhat by the ribcage. But the brain... the brain is protected by a shell of bone (the skull) but it sticks out on top on the end of an appendage (the neck). And the neck, to be honest, isn't that tough. 

And, because the brain needs a lot of blood, and it is farther from the heart in the head, critical veins and arteries run through the neck. Not to mention nerves. 

Now, maybe evolution thought our eyes should be high up to see threats better. And, for some reason, wanted a short run of the optic nerves. (Actually, I read somewhere that the optic nerves and the retina are extensions of the brain.) So it put the brain high as possible. And, apparently this is helps with survival more than protecting the brain like the heart.

So maybe evolution didn't mess up. 

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Best Picture

The Oscar Nominations came out Tuesday. 

This year is unusual for me because I've seen three of the ten Best Picture nominees. Usually I'm lucky to have seen one of them.

The nominees are (see what I did there?) and my opinion of them are (ones I've seen are bold):

All Quiet on the Western Front (I assume a remake of the WWI movie. Never heard about it until today. It's on Netflix and I don't have that service anymore because I wasn't watching it.)

Avatar: The Way of Water (Ratings bait to get people to watch the ceremony. Haven't seen it.)

The Banshees of Inisherin (Never heard of it)

Elvis (Good movie. Was mostly centered on Col. Tom Parker)

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Good movie but hard to follow)

The Fabelmans (In my DVD.com queue. Suppose to get it in February)

Tár (Haven't seen it)

Top Gun: Maverick (Also ratings bait. Good, fun movie but not Oscar material.)

Triangle of Sadness (Never heard of it.)

Women Talking (Ditto.)

 I remember when the Academy increased the best picture nominees to ten to, once again, get more people to watch. 

I might watch a little of the ceremony. But I doubt it. I just don't care. Now if Will Smith can slap someone, that might be interesting.

How do you feel about the Oscar nominations? Let me know in the comments below.

Brilliant Design

My car has a problem in winter. Not that it doesn't handle snow well. It does. Put on a set of traction tires and it's a mountain goat in the snow.

No, the problem is the backup camera gets dirty and therefore almost useless. Here's what it looks like:

That's because the camera is on the exterior of the vehicle:

So I have to clean it regularly. When it's clean, it looks like this:

Which doesn't last long in wet/snowy conditions.

My wife drives a Volkswagen GTI and it has a brilliant design on its backup camera. It sits behind the rear logo where it stays clean:

And when she puts the car in reverse, the logo pops open to expose the camera:

I think this is amazing and a brilliant design. Why doesn't my car have something similar?

I love good design. And I'm mostly happy with my car, don't get me wrong. It just has this one flaw my wife's car doesn't.

QR Codes are Back!

For a while there, I thought QR codes were dead. But they are back. I'm seeing them in all sorts of places. Restaurants, TV commercials and shows, signs. And I blame the pandemic.
Restaurants, once there were allowed to open, needed a way to show you their menu without you touching their menus. So they used QR codes: (That was in a restaurant last September still.) And I think people suddenly were reminded of their usefulness. 
Here's one I saw on television during a football game:

I saw one on the desk in a hotel room. So I scanned it. It brought up the room service menu!
According to Wikipedia, QR stands for "quick response" and the QR codes were invented in 1994 by a Japanese automotive company (that I've never heard of) called Denso Wave. I didn't realize they'd been around that long. In 1994 I just learned the existence of email.
It's interesting how they pretty much died out and then made a comeback during the pandemic.
Have you seen the increased use of QR codes, or do you think I'm crazy. Let me know in the comments below.

Washington's Amazing Season is Over

(Happy New Year!)
The University of Washington Huskies (10-2 in the regular season) ended their 2022 season last week playing Texas (8-4) in the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio. Before the game, Washington was ranked #12 in the CFP and Texas was #20.

What's interesting about playing Texas is that their coach is Steve Sarkisian who, from 2009 to 2013, was the coach at Washington. He left to coach USC and the Huskies brought in Chris Petersen to lead the team. Petersen took the Huskies to the CFP!

Due to being in Texas, the Alamo Bowl was like playing on Texas' home field. San Antonio is only 79 miles from Austin by car (I'm amazed anything in Texas is that close). Attendance at the game was 62,730 (which is pretty good for a bowl game), almost all of it Texas fans. Crowd noise was definitely a factor.

Quarterback Michael Penix had trouble connecting on long passes. He completed none. Either he overshot or the Texas secondary stopped the catches. But he did well on shorter passes and managed to eclipse Cody Pickett's record for passing yards in a single season.

The officials didn't call an obvious pass interference penalty and reduced a roughing-the-kicker to running-into-the-kicker.

But still, the Huskies were never behind and won the game 20-27, finishing their season 11-2.

The final AP and CFP rankings will probably come out after the National Championship game on January 9th. I suspect we'll go up in both.

This has been an amazing year, especially after last year when they were 4-12. Coach  DeBoer turned the program around so fast. Maybe next year we'll be 11-1 in the regular season and go to the CFP like we did in 2016 under Coach Petersen. Who knows? I just know I'm looking forward to it.

The Pac-12 sent seven teams to bowl games this year. But they ended up 3-4 after losing both New Years Day games (which were actually played 1/2/23). Two of the losses were razor thin, one going into overtime. But Washington State and Utah both lost big. Utah was playing Penn State in the Rose Bowl.

I was hoping the Pac-12 would do better this year. Lately it seems the conference has trouble winning bowl games. Again, there's next year.

Death to the Emperor

My latest book, Death to the Emperor, has been released on Kindle and paperback. It's available on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) and Barnes and Noble (paperback).

For nearly twenty years, Titus Chumba has either worked for, or hidden from, the emperor of the Core Empire. Now he's become involved in a plot to assassinate the most powerful man in the galaxy. All Titus needs are rare and closely-guarded artifacts. Can he find what he needs and kill the emperor who has tormented him so much for decades? Or will the plot bring Titus to his own final demise?

I swear this is the last book I'm going to write about Titus Chumba! The other books dealing with Chumba are the Chumba of the Intelligence Corps and the Treasures of Space novels.

My next book, Annihilation from Above, will be coming out early next year from World Castle Publishing.

The Winter Solstice

The winter solstice happened yesterday at 1:48 PM PST (4:48 PM EST, 21:48 UTC).(Some sources say 21:47 UTC.) The world "solstice" means "sun standing" in Latin. It is related to the word "armistice" basically meaning "arms standing," or the end of fighting.

The solstice happens when the sun is the farthest it gets from the equator. It is either over the Tropic of Cancer (summer in the Northern Hemisphere) or the Tropic of Capricorn (winter in the Northern Hemisphere) at its highest point. It stops moving north or south on the solstices. 

On the equinoxes (spring and fall), the sun is over the equator at its highest point.

It used to kill me as a kid that winter didn't start until late in December. Where I lived we usually got snow early in November. Or often on Halloween.

Now where I live, it's not quite so bad, but we did have below zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures and snow in early December.

Some people try to ascribe mythical qualities to equinoxes and solstices. But they are simply a result of the tilt of Earth's axis.

Starting today, the time of daylight will get longer until the summer solstice in June.

Specialization

The other day on Twitter I ran across a Robert Heinlein quotation. The quotation was: "Specialization is for insects."

Now, Heinlein is probably my favorite author. I've read everything he's written (almost, there was a recent release I haven't read yet)(After reading his first postmortem release, not sure I want to). 

Heinlein had a huge influence on me, not just my writing but my life and politics. I wanted to name one of my kids "Alexander Heinlein Townsend." (My wife put the kybosh on that.)

So, it was hard for me to admit that, in this case, I don't agree with Mr. Heinlein!

The full quote is:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

And in a way, he has a point. People should be able to do lots of things to live a full life. But that list is... long. I can do maybe half of them. But I don't agree with the last sentence. Specialization has given us the civilization we have today. People specialize in their field and improve our lives. I don't want Elon Musk to be my doctor, for example. That's not his specialization. Doctors specialize and for good reason. Scientists specialize. You wouldn't want a biologist running the James Webb Space Telescope.

And there's a reason insects are so successful (there's thought to be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000* of them): specialization.

So, yes, be able to do a lot of things, but also specialize in your field to become the best you can be in that field. 

Do you agree with me or with Robert Heinlein. Let me know in the comments below.

*That's 10^19

 

Bad Book

Ladies and gentlemen, herein I am going to review a book, not a novel (I review the novel here).

I bought this book on advice from a friend. It's been a long time since I bought a mass market paperback. But I had no reason to think there would be issues.

There were.

As I read the book, I noticed the spine of the cover coming off!

This concerned me. I was worried that the book might just fall apart. But I kept reading... carefully.

By the time I finished the novel, the spine was almost gone from the book itself:

And, in fact, I could open the cover to the point that it was just barely hanging on:

And when I set the book down, it looked like this:

Now, the novel was very good. I enjoyed it a lot. But the book sucked. Maybe they are making all mass market paperback this poorly these days. Maybe I just got a bad one. I don't know. I didn't abuse the book (except once left it in a hot car). I was very gentle with it when I saw it was starting to fall apart. 

I don't know if this is typical of mass market paperbacks.

Have you had a similar experience? Let me know in the comments below.

The Huskies' Regular Season is Over

The University of Washington's football team, the Huskies, have ended their regular season. And, unlike last year, it has been a pretty great season.

After the last season, almost the day after the Huskies lost the Apple Cup to the Washington State Cougars, the university's athletic department hired Kalen DeBoer to be head coach. DeBoer was, at the time, the head coach at Fresno State, a smaller school that was known for having a strong offense. And one thing the Huskies needed was a better offense. 

I was a bit worried. DeBoer had only been in Fresno one year. Before that he was at a very small school (University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota). How would DeBoer handle the pressures and spotlight of a much bigger school? Would he succeed? Or would it overwhelm him? Spoiler alert: he succeeded.

Back in 2008-2009 when the Huskies weren't doing very well, I delineated what I would call a "good season." It was:

Win at least 8 regular season games (out of 12)Beat Oregon (we haven't beat Oregon since 2017)Beat Washington StateGo to a good bowl gameWin that bowl gameAnd this year the Huskies have done the first three. They have won ten regular season games. They beat Oregon in an upset (ruining the Ducks' chance at a playoff spot), and they won the Apple Cup, beating Washington State.
(Because Oregon State beat Oregon, the Huskies are in third place in the Pac-12, with Oregon in fourth place.)

That is amazing for a coach's first year in a new (for him) program. There was a dark time during the season. In week five we lost to Arizona State and in week six we lost to UCLA. Both were away games. It doesn't seem to matter who is the coach or who are the players, we always seem to lose to Arizona State at their stadium and we tend to lose our first away game. 

We don't know what bowl game we'll get. There is a possibility we'd get the Rose Bowl and play Ohio State. That would be a tough game. In any case, we should get a good bowl game. We'll have to see if they win it.

The University has extended DeBoer's contract. They did that even before the Apple Cup. And they Huskies should only get better.