Hayes-Compatible

Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s brother, was a professor of atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany, retired in 1985. A colleague of Dr. Vonnegut, Vincent J. Schaefer, discovered in an experiment during the 1940s that dry ice rapidly produced ice crystals when introduced into a cloud of supercooled water droplets.

Many clouds in our atmosphere are giant collections of supercooled water droplets that refuse to precipitate. One form that clouds precipitate is by a process called aggregation where the water droplets freeze and begin to fall through the cloud, gaining mass as they contact and acquire other water droplets on their way down. Unfortunately, water in this form will not freeze without the help of a condensation nuclei or until the temperature reaches levels around or below -40°C (-40°F), hence the designation “supercooled”.

The dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) Schaefer introduced into the cloud acted as a cooling agent, instantly bringing the droplets well past the necessary -40°C (-40°F) they need to freeze causing the cloud to precipitate. This was the birth of cloud seeding, or the artificial coaxing of precipitation by introducing particles into clouds to act as condensation nuclei and/or a cooling agent.

Dr. Vonnegut soon discovered that silver iodide has a crystalline structure similar to an ice crystal and that, because of this, it acts as an effective ice nucleus at temperatures of only -4°C (25°F). Additionally, silver iodide is far easier to handle than dry ice when attempting to fly it over a cloud to seed the cloud, which is precisely a process that Dr. Vonnegut refined and that is still in use by rainmaking corporations today.

It was this process and research of cloud seeding that inspired his brother Kurt Jr. to create and write a wonderful novel about Ice-Nine.

Note: I wrote this for everything2 back when I was in college.

I have memories of reading the Dungeon Master’s Guide cover to cover up north one summer around fourth or fifth grade, no small feat for me at the time. Small print on a mass of pages, a few big words and many foreign concepts. I remember thinking it was fascinating, and it fueled many hours of imagination playing with Lego sets.

It seems cheesy to say but I really think AD&D (coupled with my BBS hobby at the time) really motivated me to learn all kinds of skills and technology at a really young age. I learned the ins and outs of WordStar writing campaigns to send my friends on. I created character sheets, cheat sheets, reference pages, and all kinds of other forms using early versions of Excel and WordPerfect. I had a database of characters stored in Ability. I created simple scripts in Telix to help make it possible to run a game in a multi-node BBS chat room.

I really don’t have much more to say that has not been more eloquently said already.

In order to keep track of the number of beers that the keg dispensed, I decided to take a photo of each cupful in its owner’s hand. This scheme meant standing by the keg the whole night, but it turned out that the keg was an epicenter of party action, so I was never lonely. (Link)

This guy is great. I could spend hours on that site, it is rather large.

mjsager: yea, that’s why i don’t pay them
speaking of bills. total cost of ownership of iphone for 2 years = $2200
mjsager: that’s like 6.28571 escorts

As usual, Alex got me thinking.

My dad, brother and I went up to the cottage to open things up. We stopped on the way home to get some eats and randomly encountered the Mythbusters build team (Grant, Tory and Kari) at the restaurant (Tony’s, somewhere north of Flint).

They seemed to be in a hurry but I managed to snap a blurry camera phone picture with Grant on his way out the door.

We won the championship! It totally ruled. I managed an assist on the game winning goal. We were down 2-0 in the first period but came back and made it 4-3 late in the 3rd.

The game last night was intense but we pulled it off in the end. No score well in to the third period. I drew about 6 minutes of penalties (they really wanted to take me out of the game, I think). One of the penalties was a roughing misconduct (I got obliterated) and they threw the guy out of the game. This really helped us because the guy was one of their best players. Final score was 2-1.