Teeth

Baby teeth are weird. They seem to take forever to get slowly looser, looser; then suddenly, wham!

I guess she’s officially a big girl now; two 6-year molars and her first visit from the tooth fairy!

Refrigerators

I don’t understand how the exact same fridge can sell for $600 more (almost 40%) with a different door. Although I do understand how the same fridge can sell for two different prices, $400 apart, depending on the sticker on the door (Kenmore vs. Whirlpool, in this case :-).

Anyway, we’ve purchased the replacement fridge. I turned the old one off, just in case it decides to catch fire or something useless like that. I took the doors off and cleaned it out, so that it wouldn’t start to smell bad (because the new fridge doesn’t arrive until Saturday…).

Dead Fridge

I suspected the fridge wasn’t working. So I stuck a Thermochron into it for a day:

(Those units are degrees Celcius; not good, in other words).

Time to go shopping, I guess…

‘Abstaining’ Teens Still Get STDs

I land firmly on the “sex education good” side of the fence, so I like seeing study results like these :

CBS News | ‘Abstaining’ Teens Still Get STDs

Teens who pledge to remain virgins until marriage have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who don’t pledge abstinence, according to a study that examined the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents.

Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier, according to the data, gathered from adolescents ages 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. But the two groups’ STD rates were statistically similar.

Soy Bad, Soy Good

From a nutritional standpoint, you should think of soy in two categories: soy that is non-fermented, and soy that is fermented. The troubles I’ve documented on this site are associated with using primarily processed, non-fermented soy foods such as soy milk, flour, nuts, baby formula and the many soy products that have been flooding the market recently.

However, studies have shown traditionally fermented soy - which is the form that is wildly popular in many Asian cultures - aids in preventing and reducing a variety of diseases including certain forms of heart disease and cancers.

Caffeine Aphasia?

A cup of coffee each morning may wake you up, but a new study suggests caffeine might hinder your short-term recall of certain words.

Caffeine made it harder for people to find a word that they already knew - the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.

(More at BBC NEWS | Health | A coffee can make you forgetful)

Food Quotes

“Food is an important part of a balanced diet”.

— Fran Leibowitz

“Vegetables are what food eats”.

— Andrew Flint

Home Depot

It’s fun walking through Home Depot with two (yes, only two) 4-foot lengths of rebar (steel reinforcing bar, for concrete). People do look at you strangely, especially the staff…

We use them for kiting. Specifically, for supporting those fiberglass telescoping fishing poles used for displaying banners, spinsocks, and the like…

Sad But True

bq. “Journalism, like all commodities, is subject to the laws of supply and demand. As the demand for skeptical reporting dropped, the supply fell back to match it.”

• John Cassidy

via the Quotation of the Day mailing list.

Still More

I’ve put a temporary patch on the drain pipe, so that the kids can use their bathroom. A piece of rubber and a hose clamp will seal the leak until I have time to do the heavy lifting (and until I can invite a friend over to help :-)…

Update from 2025: we replaced the patch - and the rest of the damaged pipe - in November 2024. So my “patch” lasted 20 years!

Plumbing Part Three

ABS < -> Copper fittings are 7.5″ long. The drop from the floor to the existing copper elbow is only 6″ so, I can’t use an adapter on the vertical run. Suspecting this in advance, I purchased everything I need to replace the DWV piping all the way back to the “closet” (a plumbing euphemism for toilet, apparently): adapter, straight pipe, elbow, closet flange, and a new wax fitting (with bolts).

Plumbing Size Fun

I was brain-dead on [Thursday]({{ <relref “old-blog-posts/2004/plumbing-trouble-and-bird-nests.md”>}}. My neighbour helpfully pointed out that I can replace the cracked copper DWV piping with ABS; they make ABS < -> copper fittings for this purpose. No plumber required; even I can work with ABS!

So I need to run out to the store and get a bunch of ABS piping, and adapters. However, I need to know what size to get. Applying my superior mathematics skills, I measure the outside diameter of the pipe at slightly less that 10″. Divide by pi, and the pipe diameter is slightly less than 3.18″. Now, I know that copper pipe is made in 3″ and 3.5″ sizes, not 3.18″ :-). This could be an inside diameter vs. outside diameter thing, but the number is still strange. Still, it’s probably safe to assume 3″, right?

Plumbing Trouble and Bird Nests

So I found the moldy smell.

The downstairs bathroom has been smelling moldy, for a little while, but between the funeral and our camping trip, I haven’t had time to deal with it. Yesterday, I finally started investigating. The odour was coming in through the vent fan, sucked in by the chimney effect from the upstairs skylight.

The previous owners had blocked up the outside portion of the vent pipe; I was hoping that the problem was that water was getting in from the outside, and soaking the insulation they had stuffed into the pipe.

Oops!

My eyeglasses are safe — at the bottom of Elbow Lake.

A deerfly landed on my face while I was out in a canoe. I swatted at it, and my glasses went flying…

Other than that, I had a fabulous vacation. More later!

Two Things

via Ned Batchelder I was reading about the Two Things meme, as in:

For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.

Anyway, I laughed out loud at one of the entries, so I decided to share.

The two things about cosmology (by Dennis Moore):

1. Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.
2. Space exists so that everything doesn’t happen to you.

When Good Discs Go Bad

So they’re finally getting around to testing digital recordable media:

PCWorld.com - Burning Questions: When Good Discs Go Bad

“We’ve found the quality varies, depending upon the type of dye used to make the write-once discs and [on the] the manufacturer,” reports Byers. Even discs from the same manufacturer, with the same brand, can test differently, Byers adds. “But there was more of a significant difference when you compared discs between manufacturers,” he explains.