Recently it developed some age-related issues. The fan developed a tendency to whir loudly on started, and it has started overheating. In fact, it has gone into thermal shutdown on several occasions.

I stuck the external sensor of a digital thermometer on the laptop’s exhaust port to see how bad it’s gotten. It was idling at 47C. Running a flash video sent it to a 63C fever. And that’s at the exhaust port – the CPU must have been even hotter.

Clearly, I needed to check on the fan and the filter. What follows are instructions to get to the fan and the filter. Use these at your own peril.

Unplug and remove the battery before proceeding.

I couldn’t find a cleaning howto, but I did find a video on replacing the CPU. I figured I just needed to go part of the way, and I’d get to the bits I needed.

The video shows where to lift the top cover. It’s the piece of plastic that runs across the top of the keyboard, right below the screen, and has the power buttons and indicator lights in it. It simply lifts off with some clicking.

The wire clip with red handle holds down the right side of the keyboard. Release this clip.

The left side of the keyboard is held down by a screw that goes into the fan housing. Remove this screw. The keyboard will now slide up toward the screen. It is attached to the board by a cable. You shouldn’t need to disconnect it.

The fan housing is held down by two screws. The one on the top left can be difficult to reach, especially when inserting it back. Keep that in mind.

After you remove these two screws, the fan simply comes out, exposing the internal side of the heatsink. It is still attached to the board by its power cables. The space between the heatsink and the fan housing is where the dirt tends to accumulate. In my case, almost half of the heatsink was plugged up.

I used a hand-held vacuum cleaner to suck up the dust in the compartment. Then I put everything back together. I didn’t end up with any extra bits, so I probably did this right.

Upon reassembly, the laptop idled at about 37C. Running a flash video ran it up to about 43C (as before, temperatures are for the exhaust air). The fan also sounds a lot better.

The procedure took less than ten minutes, and that includes me being careful and taking pictures.

During the late forties and early fifties we developed a new chemical, called PFOS. This was a fairly impressive chemical. On the one hand, it was tremendously stable, able to survive a very broad range of conditions without suffering molecular degradation. On the other hand, it had a lot of industrial applications. Because it is so stable and unreactive, it became best-known as a stain repellant.

Now, fast-forward forty years, to the nineties. Tests of the global blood supply started turning up minute amounts of organic flourides. With a little bit more digging, it turned out that the mystery chemical was PFOS. The stuff that for last forty years was keeping our couches safe from stray barbecue sauce made its way into everyone’s blood stream.

Further tests revealed that it was not only humans, but pretty much every wildlife creature tested for PFOS gave positive results. By now, it is believed that PFOS has entered the global water cycle.

Is PFOS bad for us? Yes. It has been shown to suppress the immune system, and probably causes cancer and a host of other conditions. Which is why it is now being gradually banned from an increasing number of industrial processes and products.

PFOS does not decay. Over time, it simply slowly disperses, leaching into its environment. One molecule at a time, by the ton.

That’s the terrifying part – we coated the entire world in a carcinogenic, immunocompromising stain repellant. So if anyone ever tells you that human activity can’t fundamentally affect the whole world, that the sky is too wide and the oceans too deep – remember PFOS.

Though perhaps there is something good in this story. If PFOS is a story of what we can on accident, imagine what we can achieve on purpose. Imagine how much more capable we are now than fifty years. So if anyone tells you that there is a problem that’s too difficult for us to solve, that global climate change is too intractable, that sustainable energy production is unfeasible, that interstellar travel is ridiculous – remember PFOS.

Concurrently, I had another problem. The stereo jack on my laptop is kind of wonky. Probably has to do with the 3-foot drop onto concrete the laptop took a few years back (but it’s Lenovo – so it survived just fine). The problem is that it keeps dropping one of the stereo channels. It’s very annoying.

Solution – hack the broken headphones. Get rid of the speakers. Fit the battery and the Bluetooth chip into the same shell. Attach RCA plugs. Wireless stereo hookup for my laptop! (Or any Bluetooth-enabled music player, like my cell phone.)

This is the guide following what I did.

What you need:

1. A small soldering iron fit for circuit work. A 12W or 15W with a fine point should suffice.
2. A hand-held Dremel tool or something similar. I use the cordless Stylus, which I love dearly.
3. A small phillips screwdriver, wire clippers, wire strippers, and an exacto blade.
4. Two RCA plugs, some small-gauge stranded wire (I used 22), and heat-shrink tubing.

This is the shell that has the controls on it. I removed the soft comfort cover. The screws were covered by a retaining ring, which can be easily removed by hand. Take out the screws to reveal the innards!

Now that the shell is open we can the control circuit on the left and the speaker on the right. Remove the screws holding the speaker in place and cut its wires. You’ll notice the battery isn’t here – it’s in the other shell.

On the right-hand side of the circuit, six wires are attached, labeled as follows (starting from the top):

1. SPRP – speaker, right, positive (brown)
2. SPRN – speaker, right, negative (white)
3. GND – ground (battery) (black)
4. SPLN – speaker, left, negative (white)
5. SPLP – speaker, left, positive (brown)
6. VB – voltage bias (battery) (red)

The shell itself simply disconnects from the rest of the headband once the screw at the top left of the shell (as seen in the picture) is removed. There is a strip of soft rubber in the headband immediately next to the shell. It is glued in place and easily removed. The wiring is behind it. Cut the wires here, disconnecting the shells from each other.

Next, we go after the battery in the other shell. It opens the same way as the first – remove the soft cover and the retaining ring, the remove the screws.

Cut the red and the black wires to free the battery (they match to the same wires in the other shell). You now how a power source! Now, to fit it into the other shell, which wasn’t designed to hold it.

The space that used to be occupied by the speaker is almost big enough for the battery, but not quite. This is where the Dremel comes in – you need to make some space for the corners of the battery. This was the most tedious part. It’s hard to say how much you need to remove, but make sure the shell can close without clamping too hard on anything.

Now the battery neatly fits into the other half of the shell.  Solder together appropriate wires – connect the battery to the control circuit, then connect the speaker leads to the RCA connectors, with enough length to give the wires a few inches of freedom outside the shell.

I connected the negative leads to the outside of the RCA connectors. I don’t think that really makes a difference though – it worked both ways with a pair of speakers I had at my desk.

The wires used in the headphones are of very small gauge, so stripping them is difficult. I used the exacto blade to carefully slice the sleeve and then strip it away. A more adventurous soul may wish to de-solder the leads from the circuit and attach leads of heavier gauge.

Important – the solder connections have to be insulated. Cover the joints with some heat-shrink tubing. It’s superior to electrical tape.

That is it! Close the shell, and screw it back together.

Overall, this took me a few hours (I did lots of poking around, and it took some time to figure out how to fit the battery in). The RCA plugs cost me a dollar at the local electronics store. Working with tiny wires is hard, but otherwise this doesn’t require much finesse.

Here’s the final product:

As I’m writing this, I’m listening to blues streaming from my laptop to the stereo system over Bluetooth. It sounds excellent.

So, how worse are the grades? About 0.13 GPA for girls and 0.3 GPA for guys. So, let’s say, quarter of a point. Does this matter?

I think that depends on the starting grade. If you’re 0.1 point short of a 4.0 GPA, that might be something important, since it keeps you from being a valedictorian. But is there a difference between 3.0 and 3.2? I don’t think so. At this point, other things, such as standardized tests and extra-curricular activities would make the biggest difference in how the student is perceived. Students with GPA scores of 3.0 and 3.2 are, academically, basically identical.

Figures on school delinquency and detention rates were not provided in the article.

Then we get to the best, and classic part – utter confusion about causality and correlation.

In a statement, the Family Research Council said the study confirms what the group has long advocated about the negative consequences of casual sex.

The study highlights that both things – a slightly lower GPA and casual sex – happen at the same time. This doesn’t mean that one causes the other. One could claim that casual sex causes students to do worse in school, by being a distraction, for example. One could also claim that lower grades cause students to drown their sorrows in promiscuity. Both suppositions are equally weak.

I would hypothesize that other factors – such as personality traits or family conditions, for example – pre-dispose these teenagers to seek the instant gratification of casual sex over the drawn-out and obscure reward structure of schooling.

I would further hypothesize that people jumping to conclusions as FRC has also didn’t pay attention in school, but probably due to things far less exciting than casual sex.

PS I’m trying to find the original study, but can’t track it down at the moment. If I do find it, I might write more about it.

This year, I’ve been tremendously fortunate to work with comedy corner by giving them regular workshops on improv. They’re a fabulous group of people, and the experience has been totally, totally sweet.

Every year, Comedy Corner puts on a big show called S.I.C.K. They sometimes invite a big headliner (this year it was Craig Robinson). They usually write a bigger feature performance (an actual play) to perform at SICK. A bunch of other comedy groups show up, too. It’s a grand time.

This year, their play included some video stuff. In the final piece of video, I’m listed in the Special Thanks section of the credits.

Awesome.

Example – Megan Fox’s thumb-gate. Toward the end of the short – and not really worth a read – article is this passage:

Fingers flew on the Web, with one-day searches on Yahoo! for “megan fox hands” increasing an astounding 800%.

While an increase of 800% in anything sounds impressive, I’d like to know – how many searches for “megan fox hands” do they usually get? Is this something that a lot of people are interested in on regular basis? Now, I understand she is superbly attractive, but I would expect majority of Megan-Fox-related searches to be along the lines of “megan fox pr0n.”

Hands?

Does this mean there is an underlying and persistent hand-fetish community focused on Megan Fox? I suppose the Internet is big, so there probably is such a community. But it can’t be that huge.

Furthermore, I can’t imagine that there is a constant stream of new pictures of specifically her hands. This means that those in the Megan Fox Hand Fetish circle must, in frustration, constantly sift through dozen of her non-hand-centric pictures. “Ugh, lingerie again!”

My point is this. “800% increase” is meaningless without some context – such as an absolute number of searches, or regular variability in the number of searches.

Oh statistics. You’re such a whore sometimes.

We deal with things that are altogether new to humanity. We do things that have never been done before, and see things that have never been seen before. And in order to get to this point, we have to think thoughts that no one has ever thought before. Something entirely new and pristine and untouched by every other person who has ever lived. That’s the thrill of science.

And what is so wild and untamed is madness. And that we must embrace and understand.

Working with IR is difficult for the obvious reason that it is invisible to the unaided eye. At the very least, UV makes starch glow a bright blue, so locating the beam involves simply sticking a piece of paper in front of it. If anything, the problem with UV is that it makes everything glow.

Catching IR is harder. Fortunately, IR viewers (a laboratory version of night vision goggles) are available. The difficulty with a laser, though, is that it is very bright. It is so bright, that when your adjusts to the brightness of the spot, it becomes difficult to see the grid. Basically, the problem is in viewing a very bright object next to a very dim object. Too much contrast.

I’ve been using a small LED flashlight with a flexible neck to brighten up the grid and reduce the contrast a little bit.

Finally, I’ve come up with the following hack: use an incandescent desk lamp to illuminate the target. Incandescent lights emit a lot of IR. Illuminating the target grid in this way reduces the contrast, bring the brightness of the spot and the grid closer together.

By the way, the IR viewer cards are terrible and I hate using them. The are only good for a very rough positioning of the beam.

Though decidedly partial, his version of the events offered a greater gut, visceral insight into what happened. Agree or disagree, reliving it through someone else’s eyes is bound to be interesting.

I would argue that such bits of mad inspiration, instinctual, careless creation exist in science, too. The Scientific Method is what comes after the secretive, mystical subconscious twists and turns by some unknown dynamics into an insight. Through some devilish talents, the improbably subconscious seeks out the single solid kernel of truth amongst a sea of half-truths and incomplete datasets. Somewhere, there is a truer pattern behind the dusty and rare windows, and discovering this pattern is not a reasonable or rational course.

The flash of genius is a lightning strike, and the few lucky enough to witness it are revealed a picture that no one has seen it before, and they are left o rediscover it, piece by piece, sometimes spending years, or their whole lifetimes, attempting to once again capture that single vision.

I say, the unquantifiable, unfathomable inspiration is a central part of what we, as scientists, do. The spark of the subconscious is as important to us as it is to artists. The Method to us is as mastery of the brush was to Dali, or skill with the guitar to Hendrix. They are the means to dress the original inspiration into a more physical manifestation that others can understand. With equations, we paint our beautiful, elegant truths.

So why not sex, drugs, and quantum mechanics?

Do we, perhaps, spend too much time honing the rational and the strictly sequential parts of our minds? Should we indulge the less structured parts of our soul, for they are the ones that will bear the more brilliant fruit?

After all, the unknown is our business. Some madness along the way is to be expected.

A useful thing to know is that starch luminesces bright blue when exposed to UV light (hence white cotton tshirts glow under black light). It is also useful to know that regular glass (such as a microscope slide) cuts off transmission at right around 350 nm.

So, I came up with a couple of tests.

Hack #1 (very crude)

Use a fused silica lens to focus the light, and then insert something sharp and opaque near the focal point. Some distance behind it, put a piece of printing paper. Distorted focal point will project something of a rainbow (as different wavelengths diffract at different angles). You will see a blue band. But – this could be actual blue! So, take a microscope slide and cover up the blue portion of the rainbow. If it disappears, it was due to UV. If it doesn’t, that’s actual blue.

Hack #2 (slightly more refined)

I’ve described before how inserting a microscope slide into a beam removes about 8% of light due to reflections on the surface. That is of course true only if there is no internal absorption.

So, put a detector (such as a Si detector with a UV-transmitting window) into the lamp’s output. If the slide attenuates the beam by about 8%, there is no UV. If it attenuates detector’s output by significantly more than 8%, there is a good amount of UV.