Daily Kup (On Weekends I Take Off from Being Unemployed)It was a little too chilly to paint for most of the day, so we 'went with the flow' and took our day-visiting 21-year-old college student to a movie, followed with birthday cake.
My daughter observed that the best thing about turning 21 was being able to Facebook "friend" the teacher who was a mentor in high school.
Kollege Kid is applying for admission to the College of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota, a school that is ranked among the top three nationally. She took the Pharmacy College Admission Test (PCAT) and scored an impressive 99% composite percentile. The Pharm program has very high admission standards so I'm hoping that this exemplary score would ease any difficulties. The other hoops are GPA, references, essays, and an interview. I know she'll do fine because she always has at anything that she puts her mind to, but it is a lot of eggs in one basket.
K-K-K- Chemistry
Kollege Kid's undergraduate major is chemistry. I haven't met many chemists but it seems to be a major that attracts some quirky humor. Perhaps they spend too much time breathing over beakers.One of my earliest brushes with satirical humor came courtesy of Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-educated mathematician and master of the the sarcastic song. Mr. Schorn, the "cool" sixth grade teacher, had a vinyl record of Lehrer's work and would play it if none of the other teachers were around. Here is the song that got me through chemistry. As predicted by the song, more elements have been discovered since that time. We'll have to make up our own next verse. (Taken in another way, that's almost profound ...)
Refill
I found this site, Think Geek, while looking for the T-shirt picture. They had me at the pizza cutter shaped like the USS Enterprise. Live long and pepperoni!
http://www.thinkgeek.com/
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5 comments:
I generally have to wrestle the "Think Geek" catalog from The Girl when it arrives. I bought her this shirt about a year ago: http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/popculture/baf9/
She's hooked now, poor thing.
RE: Tom Lehrer. My understanding of heavy elements is somewhat limited, but do not most trans-uranic actinide elements have very short half-lives? Indeed IIRC, most of the "new" elements discovered in recent decades have had lives so brief they can only be inferred from squiggles resulting from nuclei colliders. If there were any stable superdense elements, I would think that nearly all of them would have already decayed into simpler elements billions of years ago, as we seem to be quite late on the Universal stage. I could be wrong though.. I'm not sure of the atomic weight of either unobtainium, or the superdense "managerium."
Catalog!?! I see the link now and just signed up. That shirt is terrific. There are several that I covet. I hadn't seen the Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock one before. I love that routine. I think I'll post it next week.
I believe you are absolutely correct about the 'high-number' elements created in supercolliders or inferred from their decay processes. Tom Lehrer is still alive, though quite elderly. It's too bad he's been silent on those issues for a while. He says he lost interest in it.
RE: "Think Geek" Catalog.. I suggested to the catalog editor that with their obvious preoccupation with bacon and caffeine, that they include a portable defibrillator in their next issue.
Well it is Dick Cheney's favorite catalog ...
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