Evidence That The New Enterprise Is Truly Huge

I had blogged before with a post that mentioned that the new Enterprise NCC-1701 from the JJ Abrams reboot is supposed to be substantially larger than the previous Enterprise on the Original Series. There was some controversy about that on some message boards (believe it or not).

Today I found proof in print that it is indeed larger. At Barnes and Noble this evening I found an issue of Cinefex (number 118, July 2009), which had an article on the new movie. If you didn't know Cinefex is a magazine dedicated to special effects in films, mostly the digital aspect of it. It had articles on the models used in the movie Moon and and behind the scenes shots of green screen effects inserted into Terminator Salvation, for example, and has advertisments for computer render farms and 3-D body scanners if that tells you the audience the magazine appeals to.

On page 42 (I know, totally coincidental) in the second column embedded in bits from the ILM people it said:
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The reconfigured ship was a larger vessel than previous manifestations-approximately 1,200 feet long compared to the 947-foot ship of the original series. "Once we got the ship built and started putting it in environments, it felt too small. The shuttle bay gave us a clear relative scale-shuttlecraft initially appeared much bigger than we imagined-so we bumped up the Enterprise scale, which gave her a grander feel and allowed us to include more detail."
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So there you have it. The new Enterprise is indeed larger than previous incarnations.

Fun With Richard Simmons!!

If you're over twenty and overweight, how can you not know Richard Simmons?

He is well known for interacting with people personally. As a matter of fact, Wikipedia has this in an article about him:

"Simmons is known for interacting at a personal level with the people using his products. This began when he started personally answering fan mail he received while a cast member of General Hospital. As a self-described devout Catholic, Simmons still personally answers emails and letters, and makes hundreds of phone calls each week to those who seek his help.He also talks to people on the air during his radio show, and holds weekly live chats in the "clubhouse" area of his website. His appearances also include a "meet and greet" time, so that people can speak to him one on one."

He always seems so friendly and inspiring that while I was still at home recovering from the operation I figured I'd go to his website and see if I could find contact information for him and send a message.

There was a webform for submitting an "email" to him. So I filled it in. I said that I had never heard his stance on weight loss surgery and was interested in knowing what he thought of it; I think I also plugged my blog somewhere in there too...okay, I really think I plugged the website. I figured it wouldn't hurt anything. Dude probably gets huge volumes of messages and mine was just one more bit of white noise in the background. That was weeks ago, I didn't think any more of it.

Today I opened my inbox and saw an email from "Richard Simmons."

The message said,
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I am not a big fan of surgery as a weight-loss tool. However, I do make an exception when a person is so morbidly obese that their very lives are at risk. A lot of people who are not in that situation make the mistake of seeing surgery as a weight-loss tool believe it is going to be like some "magic bullet" and all of their weight-loss troubles will be over once they have the surgery. But the bottom line is that, even with the surgery, successful weight-loss is all about making important lifestyle changes for the rest of your life. You still have to do the work it takes to lose the weight and that's the bottom line. I do hope that you are still working hard reaching for your own goals and that you never give up on YOU!

Your Friend,
Richard
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I have mixed feelings about this. I think it may be him; he has a reputation for personally interacting with people struggling with weight issues. My wife immediately asked what I already suspected; what if this isn't really " The Richard Simmons"?

If I am to believe his public persona, his reputation, the long time that elapsed between sending the initial message and getting this one back as well as the vocabulary choice in the reply, I'm apt to believe it really was him. I hesitate because everything is spelled properly and sounds like proper grammar, which is normally a red flag that something is a boilerplate response; call it wishful thinking, but I would rather think he either has staff check for mistakes or he's just a smart guy.

So this time around I'm going to take a chance and believe this was him. It makes me happy to think so, makes me feel a little more inspired for the day! If it really was him, I think it speaks volumes about his character that he would take time out of his schedule to speak to some insignificant lonely voice on the Internet asking him an innocent question. Sometimes taking five minutes from your own schedule can make a big difference in someone else's day and make them feel as if maybe, just maybe, they're not as insignificant as they think themselves to be.

Thank you Richard.

With Star Trek Coming Out Soon...

...I started wondering...do you think Vulcans all just have Asperger's?

Something Arrived!

It's always fun to get deliveries. Unless it's something like a summons or a bill collector. But this wasn't anything like that.

Several people gave me get-well wishes and cards and I've appreciated all of them; I hung up all the cards on a wall while I'm at home recovering. One of my friends sent me a gift certificate to ThinkGeek, an online store geared primarily at selling unusual and geeky toys for scifi and fantasy cubicle dwellers.


I spent a lot of time deliberating on what to get. I wanted to get the Jedi deluxe robe and a ForceFX lightsaber, but the robe and saber were too expensive. Plus the ForceFX doesn't have a detachable blade. What fun is that to walk around a Renaissance Fair in if you can't have just the hilt? I found another blade/hilt combination available but they were going to take time to get in stock and you lost the fun sound effects. Bleh.

There were other fun toys I considered there but decided I wanted something that would be useful, utilitarian, that I would get use out of after the novelty wore off.

And they arrived today.

One neat thing...the packaging is whimsical. Here's a picture of the inflatable cushions put into the box to protect the product...can you read what was used to inflate the pillows?
It's a play on the thing about having your order packed by trained monkeybots. It's fun!

Anyway...here's what I ordered...
Whenever we have family dinners, sometimes we have to take our own silverware. Or if we're going on a picnic, or most common I have to take silverware in to work with me if I pre-made something for lunch. These are "light my fire" sporks, one large utensil and one four-piece multicolor set. It has a fork, spoon, and knife edge all built in!

I know, I know...I'm odd that way. This is the perfect combination of fun and whimsy and utility combined with the irony of the fact that I can't eat "real food" for another week and a half. I loved it! These were also the only things that in my deliberation I consistently returned to while considering the wifi shirt and various games and cube toys I could get. Almost got the keychain multitool but...just not enough need for it...

The big one is a little bigger than I thought it would be, but I don't care.

Speaking of which...I didn't realize the time. I need to get my scheduled lunch in now...I think I'll try one of these babies out!

Food and Energy

Food is fuel.

This is supposed the be the mantra of people who had bariatric surgery. Food is fuel, not my friend.

Or was that from Finding Nemo?

At any rate, people usually think of a separation between food being fuel and food being...food. As if somehow it's special when in fact food, like people, are complex chemical reactions. Calories (technically, kilocalories) in food are a measurement of stored energy, and this energy is unlocked by reactions within our bodies for use in things like moving and breathing and keeping us warm. Even gasoline can have an estimated calorie count to measure the energy it stores (a gallon of gas has about 31,000,000 calories, by the way).

One quick way to show energy is to light a material on fire and watch the energy be released as heat, and under the right conditions an amazing amount of energy can be released when fat ignites. This is the theory behind spontaneous human combustion...that the fat in the body is lit up and burns at such an amazingly high temperature that literally all that's left are the person's shoes. There have been experiments done on pig carcasses that demonstrate that this amount of heat can indeed be produced (pigs are very similar in composition to humans for the purposes of simulating bodies; they're used in forensics research quite a bit because of this).

What am I getting at?

Just the coolest use of bacon ever.

A journalist at Popsci.com managed to use bacon, regarded by many to be the meat of the gods, as a thermal lance. Yes. He used bacon to cut iron.

I thought this was cool as all heck, but it was also a good demonstration of what can be done with the energy stored in food and how it demonstrates the chemical nature of what we're putting into our bodies to live. Unfortunately a lot of people with large sticks in their posteriors appear to be quick to nitpick the article...the author made a crack about prosciutto being Italian for "expensive bacon" and the comments seem to fill up with people correcting him. As if people reading the site will actually think there's an Italian word for that...smart people can be really dumb sometimes.

For a quick chemistry lesson and demonstration of something food can do that is really cool, check out the site. And if you want another demonstration of what stored energy can do when suddenly released from a body, try Googling "spontaneous human combustion" and "wick effect". And yes, I'm aware the wick effect (essentially the fat in your body acts like an inside-out candle) isn't an explanation for all spontaneous human combustion events, but work with me here...this was supposed to be an entry about bacon burning iron. That's pretty darn neat.