One of the students in the IAEA inspector school I taught for the last two weeks, Tom, was from England and was a fellow highpointer. On their weekend off, between the two weeks of classwork, most of the students went to places like the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas. Tom went to climb Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico (and his first 4,000m summit). Britain has some great mountains, particularly in Scotland, but the highest point is only 1,344m (4,409') tall. It's a bit like climbing in New England; the mountains are wonderful, but low. So getting the chance to climb a really tall mountain was great for him.

We got to talking about hiking in Britain, which I have never done, and a truly nerdy highpointing endeavor presented itself: climbing Ben Nevis (1,344m), the highest point in Scotland, Snowdon (1,085m), the highest point in Wales, and Scafell Pike (978m), the highest point in England—all in 24 hours time. Tom's done it three times and says that the hard part isn't the climbing (only Ben Nevis has a significant amount of vertical gain to overcome), it's the driving logistics. Apparently Wikipedia has a page describing this endeavor, which is known as the Three Peaks Challenge.

I'm going to have to find some business reason to go to Britain sometime soon, take a few days of vacation afterwards, and give this a try. Of course I'll have to find some local to go with me because I don't trust myself driving on those weird backwards roads. I'm not sure what's so appealing about climbing 3 national highpoints in a day... maybe it's just because my list of successfully ascended national highpoints is currently a little lackluster (it consists of exactly one country, Barbados, who's massive 340m highpoint is a driveup).

So I was glad to hear that mega-nast Warren Jeffs got nabbed by the cops. I swung over to the FBI's Top Ten Fugitives webpage to see if they had given Jeffs' spot on the list to some new wanker. Sadly, he's still on there—he's just labeled as "Captured." Looking at the rest of the list, I noticed something very odd.

While the fugitives aren't explicitly numbered, the fact that these are the "10 Most Wanted Fugitives" indicates that the FBI does order their fugutives by some measure of how "Wanted" they are. The implied numbering on the webpage shows some guy called Jorge Alberto Lopez-Orozco at number one. He must be one bad dude. But wait, who's this at #2? It's our old pal, Usama Bin Laden.

I find Bin Laden's inclusion on the list a bit hokey; for one thing we all know his name, what he looks like, and what he did. Unfortunately, putting his picture on the internet isn't going to improve the chances of finding him. The other guys on the list are people that might well be living among us. Having their picture up on the wall might actually lead to an arrest, as was the case for Mr. Jeffs— the cop that pulled him over recognized him from the list.

But nevermind that he's on there... if we decide that he should be on the list, how is he not #1? What exactly did Lopez-Orozco do to achieve more Wantedness than Bin Laden? His dossier suggests that he murdered three people and then unlawfully flew to avoid prosecution. Implied violation of the laws of physics aside, somehow his crimes against humanity seem to pale in comparison.

Obviously, these people must not be ordered in terms of their Wantedness. But they aren't arranged alphabetically... so what's the deal? I'm going to check back until they remove Jeffs from the list and upgrade whoever is currently #11 and we'll see where they put them. I'll keep you posted on this amazingly profound information.

For reference, here is the current list (Want-O-Meter numbering implied) as of 2006.08.30:

1. Jorge Alberto Lopez-Orozco
   
2. Usama Bin Laden
   
3. Diego Leon Montoya Sanchez
   
4. James J. Bulger
   
5. Warren Steed Jeffs -- CAPTURED
   
6. Robert William Fisher
   
7. Victor Manuel Gerena
   
8. Glen Stewart Godwin
   
9. Richard Steve Goldberg
   
10. Donald Eugene Webb
    

The Fine Print: If you read the FBI's Most Wanted FAQ, they explicitly state that the members of the list are not ranked. But I still don't understand how the ordering is chosen...

I checked back on the FBI's site for the first time in awhile today, and discovered that Jeffs' spot had been filled with Ralph B. Philips. The order of everyone else hadn't changed, so I guess your spot on the list is sort of "dead man's boots." Also of interest... Mr. Philips has already been captured. So maybe spot #5 is sorta the least desireable spot on the list, from the fugitive's point of view.

For the last two weeks I was teaching an IAEA inspector's course on basic nondestructive assay of nuclear materials. This was my first time teaching the gamma ray detection side of the course and I think I did very well. In a couple months I'll be teaching another course, this time on the neutron side.

This past weekend I made the first tentative step towards buying a house: I went and looked at a house that a friend is selling. I clearly have no idea how this whole process works. What I do know is this: I hate shopping. I have a tendency to identify something I'm shopping for as "good enough" and "cheap enough" and just buy it rather than having to do more shopping and reap the diminishing returns. Of course, buying a house is like the king of all shopping experiences and the difference in prices for a bit more work can amount to thousands of dollars. So I'm going to have to bite the bullet and actually be thorough on this.

In other news, I'm glad that Pluto is finally not referred to as a planet. I found the old definition to be annoyingly unrigorous. The fallout for websites like nineplanets.org is rather humorous. Go IAU!

When I recently downloaded 25GB of laserdisc arcade ROMs, I found myself with an arcade machine hard drive that was rapidly becoming full. In addition to the massive quantity of arcade data (>200GB), the drive also stores my entire MP3 collection (>60GB). Rather than trying to figure out what to get rid of... I figured, why not just buy a bunch more space. The original drive in there was a 300GB device. I just installed a new Seagate 750GB monster, giving me my first ever terabyte machine.

Anyway, so let's say you filled a semi trailer (48' long x 8.5' wide x 8' tall = 3264 cubic feet) with 750GB harddrives (1" x 4" x 5.78" = 23.12 cubic inches = 0.0134 cubic feet). You would, of course, require 243,582 drives, for a total storage capacity of 182,686.5 terabytes.

Now, let's say you drove the semi from New York to San Francisco (4,670 km via the I-80 route) at the Google Maps estimated rate, making the trip in 48 hours of driving. Of course, you'd be obeying 49 CFR part 395 and only driving 11 hours per day, meaning that you would arrive in San Francisco exactly 100 hours after you left.

Your information bandwidth would therefore be 182,685.5 TB/100 hours or...

The moral of this story is... if you've got a lot of data to move, it's probably faster to use sneakernet (or seminet, depending on your needs) than the internet. The other moral is that my arcade machine is teh sw33tz.

Broxton came over tonight and we took advantage of a great storm down in the valley and relatively benign local weather to do some lightning photography. We both got some good shots.

We also discovered that Mike's camera is just way better than mine. He also was a bit more lucky with the aim and framing. I ended up with three shots that I like; he ended up with about 10.

This is what two inches of rain in an hour looks like on my weather station (click for a clearer view):

And this is what a massive leak in my ceiling looks like:

Apparently there was so much flooding that they closed the bridge between the lab and town, the road that acts as a bypass for the bridge (West Rd.) and also 502, the main hill going up into town from the East. This effectively cut off the entire town for a little while this afternoon, due to flooding.

My lightning detector is still not installed in the rooftop weather station; it is sitting on my desk in the arcade room. It is not grounded to anything and thus has very poor reception. However, the lightning was so intense and close today that it picked up a lot of strikes. During one particularly intense lightning datapoint, the rain gauge read an average rate of ~8500 mm/hr (meaning about 5.6 inches of rain had fallen during that minute). This was obviously an error, likely caused by a nearby lightning strike corrupting the data coming down the wire from my rain gauge. Luckily, the gear all seems to still be working.

Robin was in town for the last week to collaborate with his former advisor here at LANL. We agreed that we would climb something during his visit, so this past Saturday we went to Colorado and climbed La Plata Peak. This was my 21st Colorado 14er, and the second highest point I've ever climbed to (below Mt. Elbert, the highest point in Colorado). La Plata is the fifth-highest peak in Colorado.

click this image for the gallery

The weather was ok in the early morning but we got a late start (7:30) and managed to find ourselves completely socked in with clouds at the summit. No view whatsoever until after we had left the summit and the cloud ceiling started rising. I had trouble sleeping the night before and didn't feel good for the entire climb, but some food and advil cleared that problem right up.

For the first time in recorded history, Robin and I passed through Alamosa at dinnertime and didn't eat at True Grits Steak House because I was in a hurry to get home (Nina had arrived at the end of her cross-country exodus while we were driving home).

This cracks me up. (thx, Penny Arcade)