Chirality in "Breaking Bad"

"Breaking Bad" is so elegant. 

In "The Cat's in the Bag," Walt tells his students about chirality: mirror-image molecules. Two chiral molecules can contain the same atoms, but behave utterly differently from one another. 

The staircase at DEA Headquarters (in Albuquerque's Simms Building lobby) descends to the left, like most spiral staircases do. The staircase in the Superlab, however, descends to the right. For right-handed people, the Superlab staircase would be uncomfortable to use. 

Law enforcement and criminality are chiral worlds. 

 

I'm Choked With Rage About This Vote Steal Shit

I can't believe that a person I thought was a friend, a lawyer, believes all this stuff.  Here's a screen cap from November 14th post (which I didn't notice until Dec. 10th).  I'm the fellow he describes as "naïve."  Fuck him.

Sacramento Far Behind The Mark Again

(Dec. 11):

I've been in Sacramento now for 30 years, and 2020 has had the driest start to a rainy season I've ever seen. It's even worse than the infamous 2013 rainy-season start, which led to two years of extraordinary drought. We're about 14% of a normal pace. Even if we suffered flooding rains from here on out we'd never catch up to normal. That's how bad it is. 

So, I looked back in weather records, back to 1877, to see where 2020 stands. To my surprise, dreadfully-dry rainy-season starts aren't all that uncommon. The ends of the years 1910, 1911, 1917, 1958, 1959, 1976, 1986, and 2013 had similarly bad starts. Still, it looks like only 1911 had a worse start than 2020 has. 

Mother Nature had better start getting serious with the rain here.

(Dec. 13 update, after the rain):  Now we're about 37% of normal!  Keep going!

Titanic Factoid

I ended up watching some National Geographic TV specials about the world’s most interesting subject, the Sinking of the Titanic. I learned a factoid I hadn’t even thought about before. Even though it took 2 hours and 40 minutes after striking the iceberg for Titanic to break into two halves and vanish below the waves, it took only five or ten minutes for the wreckage to reach the ocean bottom more than two miles deep. A waterlogged steel boat doesn’t float, it sinks, and fast too, with the stern in particular shredding into pieces as it raced through the cold, dark water. For some reason, 108 years later, that speedy death plunge really bothers me.

Sleeping Whales

So cool! Interesting...the whales in this group in the photo all have their backs to each other.

Noem and Newspeak

 South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem:

"The only reason you know who I am today is because the liberals have been busy kicking me in the head for all the decisions I've made for my people in South Dakota. But let me tell you, my people are happy. They're happy because they're free."

From George Orwell’s “1984”:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Romantic Scene From The Rudy Giuliani Story

Barf!

Albuquerque Monolith

It's here, it's there, it's everywhere!:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The mystery continues — another monolith has been spotted. 

This time, the monolith was found in Albuquerque. Mayor Tim Keller tweeted a photo of the monolith Monday morning, which appears to be near Pan American Freeway and Montano.

Sorry For Not Posting Of Late

I've been rewatching "Breaking Bad" and did not want to disturb concentration. Found some fun new things for my February Salvador Dali talk for SWPACA (which unfortunately will be remotely). Visited the zoo a couple of times. Had a Covid scare, but apparently it was a false alarm. Been working quite a bit with Dan.

Dog Of Wisdom

Big in the nine-year-old age cohort: