DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

According to the Independent (article was originally here but now pay-per-view; see archived copy here):

Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analysed. “Inept political hacks” running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone with a memory; the Bush Administration did the same thing after the WTC attacks in 2001:

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency’s news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.

Hugh Kaufman has worked at the EPA for 30 years. He investigated Love Canal in 1977. His credentials as an expert on toxic waste would be difficult to question.

In contrast, President Bush is well-known for suppressing and distorting science to suit political ends.

In a radio interview with Living on Earth, Kaufman describes the scope of the problem:

…first of all you have a large amount of hazardous materials in the area. Industrial discharges to the sewers have now been released. Sewage that would go into the sewers and into wastewater treatment plants, all of that is being released. You have oil and gas from gasoline stations, and waste oils that have been released. You’ve got household hazardous materials; you’ve got pesticides; you’ve got chemicals. There’s a lot of hazardous materials storage areas in the area. So what you have is a witch’s brew of water that not only contains bacteria and viruses from sewage, but you also have heavy metals and other toxic hazardous materials.

Any sane recovery plan will need to address these problems.

Dear Gov. Schwarzenegger, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Sen. John Campbell, and especially Assembly democrats in the pocket of labor unions, plus the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the State Building Trades Council:

You suck.

Sincerely,

matthew mcglynn

The BBC has published a Flash (!) version of the old Infocom text adventure based on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

That was the first and only Infocom title I ever bought. I’d poked at a few pirated copies of the Zork series and maybe Planetfall, but never played seriously or with any intention of finishing. Although I did download the instruction set for winning Zork I in the fewest possible moves, because I thought that was an important thing to have handy. (Geek trivia note: as it’s largely a series of one-letter instructions and short commands, the whole thing fit easily onto a couple lines of text on the BBS screen I downloaded it from.)

So I played the H2G2 game for an hour or two… got off the planet, got the fish in my ear, and got frustrated. I don’t think I ever ran the program again. I didn’t have much patience for games, much less games that lie to the player.

But now, thanks to the BBC, I can relive all my adolescent frustration for free, online, with pictures!! — a real change of pace considering the game’s ancestry.

Now I’ve spent about 20 minutes at it, and I can’t even stop the bulldozer. Clearly I was a cleverer guy at age 17 than I am now. Note to self: all those jokes about killing brain cells in college may have, in retrospect, been less funny than originally believed.

The BBC site also contains an interview with Steve Meretzky, the programmer who worked with Douglas Adams to create the Infocom game. (The interview alludes to the great difficulty of the Babel Fish puzzle, suggesting that, 20 years ago, I downloaded the solution to that from the BBS, too. Hmph.)

Pictured is the remains of a mature heirloom tomato plant: one lone tomato sitting in the dirt where the plant used to be.

WTF? What happened to my tomato plant?

The garden is fenced, so the deer can’t get in. The raised beds have hardware cloth (gopher wire) underneath. And as much as I hate the neighborhood turkeys, I can’t honestly blame this on them; it’s not their style. (They’d have wrecked the whole garden, and then crapped in my work gloves.)

The other five tomato plants were untouched. This one appears to have been sucked into the ground, whole, shedding the one tomato we hadn’t picked yet on its way down.

I’ve been meaning to write about my DrumDial for a year. I’ve been a student of various tuning practices for as long as I’ve been playing the drums (a longer time than I like to admit), so I can say with a bit of authority that this is the first tuning tool I’ve seen that actually works.

Drums can be difficult to tune because it takes a great ear to isolate the head’s basic tone from the sound of the overtones. The drum’s apparent pitch could rise or fall after impact, depending on the relative pitches of the heads and shell. Fortunately, measuring head tension takes you straight to the core problem (“the head is too tight or loose at this lug”), bypassing the misleading symptoms of the problem (“I think this sounds higher but I’m not sure!”).

With the DrumDial, it’s a simple matter to tune all the lugs to precisely the same tension. The result, in my experience, is a well-tuned drum. Without all that incessant tapping.

Measuring head tension makes it easy to adjust top and bottom heads relative to one another. Pitch is elusive, so it’s handy to not rely on it… just use the DrumDial to guide the tuning process. For example, set the resonant head a few PSI higher or lower to achieve the sound you want. It’s easy to make uniform changes, and easy to return to previous settings, because the calibrated meter makes everything objective. You could actually record your favorite tuning strategies, or maintain different ones for rehearsal, big vs. small venues, acoustic vs. miked gigs, etc.

Tuning is faster this way, too, because there’s no need to question “how far is far enough” at every lug. Just watch the dial. It’s no harder than pumping up a bike tire.

There are three things I don’t like about the unit:

• It’s heavy.
• It’s fragile. (Fortunately it comes with a foam-lined box, small enough to keep in a hardware bag.)
• The rim standoff clip is too fiddly and has to be re-attached every time the DrumDial is taken out of the box.

The first two problems can’t be helped, but I can suggest a usability improvement that works around the third one: when I install a new head, I use a permanent marker to draw a ring of dots on the head, about two inches inside the rim in front of every lug. To tune the drum, I set the point of the DrumDial on each marker dot in turn. This way I never need the standoff clip.

All in all, I’ve found this to be an indispensible piece of gear, so much so that even though I’ve cracked the plastic face due to careless storage, I can’t part with the thing for the two weeks it would take to send it in for repair.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (40% off DrumDial)