"You smashed the limbs of Leikn, you bashed Thrivaldi; you knocked down Starkadhr; you trod Gjalp dead under foot."

...a segment of an old Norse prayer to Thor, the god of Thunder who has the hammer of lightning. Why quote this? Because it's Thursday AND we've just experienced yet another panoply of Thor's handywork overnight. "Thors-day" is where we get "Thursday" from...I assume you know that. Today you get a little mythology lesson.

I've always been interested in the Norse culture and its rich mythological explanation for the goings-on of the world. Once you become familiar with all the Gods, Goddesess, and lesser players it actually all makes sense. You've got to remember that the folks of the time didn't understand science. I find it quite impressive that they noticed the little intricacies of nature and were able to twine them all together in tale.

Most of what we know of the Norse beliefs come from a written work Prose Edda. Note that Prose Edda and Poetic Edda are two different works. I really do know what I'm talking about :) Anyway, Prose Edda is a collection of works that were filtered and compounded into one tome of Norse legend. From this we get some tales of Thor.

Some of those tales I will share with you today.

In the beginnings, the god Loki, master of all mischief and chaos, was captured by Geirrod. Geirrod hated Thor and forced Loki to bring Thor to him. This was a ruse so that Geirrod could kill Thor and be done with him.

On the way to Geirrod's castle, as the story goes, Loki and Thor stopped for a rest at the home of Grid. Grid was a giantess and got wind of what was going to happen. When Loki briefly left them alone Grid turned to Thor and explained the trap and Geirrod's plan. To aid him she gave Thor her iron gloves, a magical belt, and a staff. The iron gloves (Jarn Griepr) and magical belt (Megingjord) give Thor the strength to lift his magical hammer, the Mjolnir.

Mjolnir could be cast or thrown as a weapon and because of the belt it would magically reappear in Thor's hand. The belt Megingjord doubles Thor's strength according to tale, making him unstoppable in battle.

With these possessions Thor slaughtered Geirrod and his daughters when he arrived. He also killed as many other Frost Giants as he could in a fit of rage. This is the end of the tale of Thor and Loki.

We are then brought to a Norse tale of romance and a father's desire to protect his daughter. Talk about a tough time when your dad is the god of Thunder!! The Alvissmal, one of the Prose Edda chapters, explains what happened.

Thor's daughter was arranged to marry a dwarf by the name of Alvis. This upset Thor greatly and he formulated a ruse to put a halt to the whole thing. Thor stood up to Alvis and told him that he was too short. He would have to prove his wisdom to Thor before he could wed the daughter by passing a series of tests. Alvis foolishly agreed. What Alvis did not know is that Thor purposely made these tests last until after the sun rose. According to Norse mythology Dwarfish creatures turn to stone in the presence of sunlight.

And so it was that Alvis was turned to stone and Thor's daughter was not wed. (times haven't changed much, have they...)

Finally we have a few tales that explain some of nature's natural goings on. I find these the most fascinating:

There was a god, Útgarða-Loki, that wished to trick Thor just for the fun of it. (Útgarða-Loki is a giant-king, a different character than just plain "Loki"). Útgarða-Loki used a magic chant to trick Thor. Thor's fastest servant was to race thought itself. Nothing can be faster than thought, so Thor lost the contest.

Following this Útgarða-Loki challenged Loki, who was present as Thor's friend, to an eating contest. Loki and Útgarða-Loki's servant Logi ate and ate and ate for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually Loki lost to Logi and it was revealed that Logi was a physical manifestation of fire. Because nothing can consume all that is natural like fire can, Loki lost.

In a contest of strength, Útgarða-Loki challenged Thor to simply lift the paw of a cat. When Thor could barely lift the cat off the ground Útgarða-Loki laughed and called Thor weak. It was revealed that the cat was actually the Midgard Serpent that Útgarða-Loki had disguised using magic; A huge sea serpent that was actually the child of Loki. Nothing could ever possibly lift such a huge beast. (In a twist of fate it is this very serpent that kills Thor at Ragnarok, but that is another story)

To test his stamina Útgarða-Loki then challenged Thor to a drinking contest. What kind of Norse god could refuse a drinking contest? Thor drank and drank out Útgarða-Loki drinking-horn but he could not empty it. It was not filled with mead, however. Útgarða-Loki had used his magic to channel the seas into the horn. No one could drink the seas in their entirety! What Thor did manage tp drink out of the horn is what gives us the tides of the ocean.

Finally Útgarða-Loki invited Thor to wrestle an old woman. The contest ensued for a long time and Thor eventually got the woman down to a knee, but he could not pin her. Thor was stunned and left, saddened. It was then revealed that the old woman was actually Old Age. It was after that Thor learned that those who knew of the contests thought Thor was most impressive as a warrior God. Only someone of such great power could possibly have done this good in hopeless fixed contests. What's the moral? Try try again?

Here is another story told to teach the people not to judge a book by its cover or underestimate a challenge:

Another noted story of Thor was the time when Þrymr, King of the Thurse (Giants), stole his hammer, Mjölnir. Thor went to Loki in hopes to find the culprit responsible for the theft. Loki and Thor went to Freyja for council. She gave Loki the Feather-robe so he could travel to the land of the giants to speak to their king. The king admitted to stealing the hammer and would not give it back unless Freyja gave her hand in marriage.

Freyja refused when she heard the plan so the gods decided to think of a way to trick the King. Heimdall suggested dressing up Thor in a bridal gown so he can take Freyja's place. Thor at first refused to do such a thing as it would portray him as a coward and womanish, but Loki insisted that he do so or the Giants would attack Asgard and win it over if he were not to retrieve the hammer in time. Thor reluctantly agreed in the end and took Freyja's place.

Odin rode Thor to the land of the Giants and a celebration ensued. The king noticed a few odd things that his bride was committing. He noted that she ate and drank more than what he would expect from a bride. Loki, who was in disguise as the false Freyja's servant, commented that she rode for 8 full nights without food eager to take his hand. He then asked why his bride's eyes are so terrifying, they seemed to be aglow with fire, again Loki responded with a lie that she did not sleep for 8 full nights eager for his hand. Then the giant commanded that the hammer be brought to his wife and placed on her lap. Once it was in Thor's possession he threw off his disguise and attacked all the giants in the room. Due to this ruse the giants were careful not to make the same mistake again.

War zone

Wow...what a wild, wild week we had for weather last week. Rain, 60+ mph winds, power lines down, trees falling on cars driving down I-91...what the HECK?

Jackie Clark of WWLP (www.wwlp.com) writes: HOLYOKE, Mass. (WWLP) - Western Massachusetts experienced another weekend packed with violent storms.

The hardest hit area was in Holyoke, where residents on Reservation Road are still picking up after a row of telephone poles came crashing to the ground.

"My neighbor called and said don't come home. The whole ground is electrified. He said all the power lines were down and don't come around," said Tim Lefebvre.

Around 5 o'clock Sunday night, a tree fell on power lines causing a domino effect, pulling down wires and a number of telephone poles. Crews are worked around the clock to restore power. In the meantime, residents said they have learned to roll with the punches.

"I'm just using my generator that runs on gas for now to run the refrigerators. Hopefully the power will be up tonight , " said Larry LaGountain.

Residents were told to expect power by late Monday night.

Report by Jackie Clark, WWLP.

Dear Quiznos

Dear Quiznos,

Today I could have really used one of your Steakhouse Beef Dip sandwiches. I was hungry. Very hungry. Much to my surprise it appears that most of your stores in Western Massachusetts have closed.

I greatly lament the loss of my favorite lunch spot. You so very much kick the pants off of Subway. I'm not a big D'Angleos fan either. So now I am left staring at the empty shell that was the Quiznos on Memorial drive. The same on Boston road. I am lonely and directionless without your tasty tummy filly calories.

What did you do to make the franchise owners want to close? Why have you ruined my lunches so? The only holdouts are the one at Umass and WNEC? So sad...so sad...

That which is boredom results in:

Well as previously mentioned I am bored.

So I hopped onto the SNEG geocachers forum where someone mentioned something about local Native Americans centered in Worcester. This led me to Wikipedia. What you need to realize is that when I click on anything in Wikipedia I always end up nowhere near any topic to which I started on.

So I ended up looking up long English words. I was brought to this page by a lake in a town we have friends in named Lake Chaubunagungamaug. Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg is the proper Native American spelling...now you can see how I ended up bridging the gap between Native American (I was looking at the Nipmucs) and "long English words". The name of the lake is actually the longest place name in the US.

So, the longest place name in the entire world is a Maori hill called Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu . WHAT?

What's the longest official English word in a dictionary? Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. I don't have enough tiles to play that one in Scrabble!! That word is called a "technical word" so some people don't recognize it as a common word according to what I read. The longest non-technical, non-coined term in the dictionary is supposedly antidisestablishmentarianism. (Jeeze, isn't is just easier to say "anti seperation of church and state??"

We have a much bigger winner in the word game for the geeks, however! If you consider a "word" to include technical jargon then here's one for you: Titin. Lol, that's just the common phrase for it. Titin is the largest known protein. As usual, any good scientific descriptor defines itself by it's name by taking a bunch of latin terms of whatever it is and squashing them together. Large protein = large word! Methionylglutaminylarginytyrosylglutamylserylleucylphenylalanylalanylglut-
aminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamylglycylalanylphenylalanyvalyl-
prolylphenylalanylvalythreonylleucyl....and so on and so forth for supposedly 189,819 characters.

In case you are wodnering, Titin is a staple protein in the operation of your muscles. Super important.

What I'd really like is to have my old Chem teacher Mr. Sarnelli draw up a model of it's chemical formula. What is it? C132983 H211861 N36149 O40883 S693. Yummy carbony-watery-nitrogeny-sulfury component.

/endGeek

Road trippin

Well Leah is gone most of the weekend. BOOOO

She has a business thing out by Boston, then she drives back here, then up north, then back to Boston, then back here. Yeesh.

And I'm all alone and bored during this whole thing Boooo.

Right now I can't decide on Apollo 13, Baseball, or Home Improvement. Not that I really want to watch any of them anyway. It is too late to go out and I didn't get to do anything productive today except swim. Oh, then it rained so I had to get out of the pool.

What a waste of a day and I am annoyed at that.

The C8H18 battle

C8H18, technically CH3(CH2)6 CH3. Octane. That's what we are talking about.

With gas prices the way they are, everybody is asking "what octane gas do I put in?" Why? Well the higher octane gas is more expensive. There are several websites and news agencies reporting that you can run your car on 87, the lowest octane available, without a problem. They state you waste your money buying higher octane gas.

Take this with a very large grain of salt. Technically they are correct. Your engine will run on 87 but some vehicles do highly recommend a higher grade of octane. We'll get into the whys in a little bit. For now we need to know what the heck this octane thing is all about.

Octane ratings, in number form, are an indication of gasoline's resistance to auto-ignition. What this boils down to is that higher octane gasoline is more resistant to burning. If you want to get technical we can talk about how the scale is measured by the equivilent mix of iso-octanes and heptanes, but we will leave that for another day.

Some common myths are that octane ratings somehow rate the power of gasoline or the speed of which it burns. This is NOT true. It also does NOT correlate to gas mileage increases or decreases due to the octane rating itself. Your style of driving a higher-performance car running low octane may result in MPG changes. Read on for more info.

Ok so what is "auto-ignition?" You may have heard the terms "pinging" or "knocking" used in conjunction with engines. When gasoline and air are mixed in the engine cylinder and compressed, the mixture's temperature rises. If it rises too much it will 'detonate' spontaneously instead of by the spark of a spark plug. It also may otherwise burn incorrectly. The timing of the explosion within the cylinder is quite precise. If you have gasoline exploding outside of this normal timing it creates a pressure/shockwave that works against the natural movements of the engine, which in turn creates the metallic 'ping' sound. This is of course not so good for the engine.

Keeping that whole timing/pressure/octane thing in mind, let's talk about the engine itself for a minute. Engines have a rating called a "compression ratio" which measures how much the air gets squished down as the cylinder compresses it. For instance, if you have an engine that normally lets in 1000 cubic centimeters of air and then compresses that to 100 cubic centimeters, this is a 10:1 compression ratio. Compression ratios vary from engine to engine. Normally higher performance engines have higher compression ratio. Why? The more you compress the fuel/air the bigger the explosion and the more power produced.

Higher octane ratings require higher activation energies. This correlates to the statement that the higher the octane rating, the more resistant to burning the gasoline is. (An activation energy is the amount of energy needed to start a reaction). Therefore you can compress higher octane gasoline more before it will spontaneously ignite or otherwise burn incorrectly.

Using the above few paragraphs we draw this conclusion. A regular non-performance oriented car does not have "lots of power" in mind with regards to engine design. The engine is built with a lower compression ratio because performance is not at the top of the list. This means the engine lasts longer, easier to design, etc, with the tradeoff of less horsepower. Therefore you can put a lower octane gasoline into the vehicle because the gasoline will burn normally at that lower compression ratio.

However a higher performance car demands more horsepower out of the engine. Said engines are usually designed with higher compression ratios. They also may be fitted with forced-air induction systems such as turbos or superchargers that effectively increase compression ratio. (the more air you stuff in to the cylinder, the more gas you can stuff in, the more power you make!) The higher compression ratio helps to produce more horsepower. It would also make lower octane gas ignite incorrectly, causing knocking. As we mentioned above the knocking is not good for engines.

Therefore, those higher compression engines require higher octane gasoline to run properly.

There is a wild card, however. Most engines today are fitted with a device called a "knock sensor". The knocking sound of engine timing being off produces a specific sound at a specific frequency. This little sensor listens for this sound. (Timing is defined as where the piston is in the up/down stroke when ignition of the gasoline occurs.)

When you're driving down the road this little sensor is always listening. Sometimes the engine will knock because of a myriad of different reasons: bad gas, too much load on the engine, wrong gasoline rating, etc... When the sensor hears the knocking sound it sends a message to the vehicle's computer saying "whoa buddy...adjust the timing to make the knocking stop!!"

When running normally most engines have what is called "advanced timing." The gasoline ignites a little before the piston reaches the top and starts on the way back down. Why? The gas takes a little time to burn so this 'advanced timing' allows the combustion to be finishing up as the piston starts its down-stroke (the "power" stroke) This produces more power.

If the timing is too far advanced then the fuel is completing its burning as the piston is still traveling up the cylinder. This also happens during if the gasoline burns too early due to overcompression of a low-octane gas. This burning explosion pushes down against the piston which is actually still on its way up. This creates the shock wave known as the knocking. Ah ha! We have a commonality between timing, octane, and knock! So too much timing produces knock!

So what does the computer do when this knock sensor starts freaking out? It adjusts the timing by retarding it. Retarding timing just means waiting longer to fire the spark plug and/or when to inject the gasoline into the cylinder. This produces less power. Also, if the timing has to be retarded too much the piston will be too far on its way down the cylinder to provide complete burning of the gas, thus producing far less power. It also results in high emissions and the possibility of unburnt gasoline. (Gasoline must be compressed to burn properly)

You can see that the adjustment of timing is finicky. Traditionally your car's computer will 'learn' what the maximum advance for timing is before it will knock. It keeps advancing the timing until it hears knock then kicks it back a notch. The most power you can get.

So you take your vehicle that the owner's manual is recommending you put 91 or 93 octane gasoline into and you instead put 87 octane into it because the media tells you your engine will run on it. Now the manufacturer of your car is recommending 91 or 93 most likely due to you owning a higher-performance or higher-compression ratio designed engine. Yes, it will run on this 87 you put into it. The knock sensor will retard the timing until the engine doesn't knock.

In the meantime, however, you are wondering why the engine seems to have lost power. Well, we just explained what happens when you retard timing to combat knock: less power. So what do you do? Mash the gas more. This uses more gas. It can also affect other systems such as automatic transmission shifts. The car is expecting xxx rpm to shift into xxx gear when the pedal is at xxx position, but that's not what the car sees so it shifts rough.

What caused all this? You put an octane in your engine that is lower than what the engine manufacturer designed the engine to run on. In extreme circumstances such as in super-duper tuned high-power cars you can retard the timing so much that it will cause expensive damage to engine components.

So what does all this boil down to? If your car recommends 87 octane you can put 87 in. The car will NOT run better with a higher octane unless you have some serious other mechanical issues with the engine. If you have a vehicle designed to run 93 octane, you should put in 93 octane. It WILL run on a lower octane but it will NOT run optimally. In the case of highly or custom tuned engines it could cause engine damage.

Keep this in mind when buying your next vehicle. Find out what octane the manufacturer recommends by looking in the book or on the gas flap. Should the vehicle you are purchasing have power-adding componentry such as a turbocharger you should expect it will require a higher octane gas.

Stupid should hurt

Sigh. I was having a nice lunch when I heard a news story of some 18 year old kid who put a baby on an inflatable pillow and then jumped on the pillow to 'make the baby fly'. Why? To make a cool video for youtube. No, I'm not going to link to the video.

What the hell is wrong with people? Part of that asshole's sentence should involve dangling him off the side of a 3 story building by the ankles and dropping him. (after he's done screaming) See how he likes it. It's on video...he can't deny doing it, he's guilty. End of story.

The poor infant is fine and hopefully is being moved to a home where he can be loved.