Winter Wonderland: Math

Freezing point of water:
0 °C, 32 °F, 273.15 K, 491.67 R.
Just because I'm trying to memorize this (and it's taped on my mirror too), here is the Fahrenheit/Celsius conversion:
Fahrenheit to Celsius: [°F] = [°C] x 9/5 + 32
Celsius to Fahrenheit: [°C] = ([°F] − 32) x 5/9
At negative 40 degrees, Celsius and Fahrenheit converge.
The various thermodynamic temperature scales used today are Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin and Rankine, named after Anders Celsius, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, William Thomson (1st Baron Kelvin) and William John Macquorn Rankine. What is the Rankine scale, you ask? It's basically Kelvin if it were based on Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. It starts measuring temperature with its zero point at absolute zero like Kelvin, and then uses degrees Fahrenheit from there up. Confusing. Yeah, I'm not a math major.
By the way, that Wikipedia article (what, you think I'm doing actual research on a Wednesday night?) is kinda out of date. It may be impossible to reach absolute zero through natural means, but metatechs have been doing since Dr. Miracle (or Miriam S. Closson, as she was called during her undergrad days) invented the Zero Point Chamber for her thesis in 1974, or was it 1975? Depends on your point of view on that whole time travel thing. Personally, I think it's kinda cheating to get an extra eight months to work on your thesis due to a chronal loop in your dorm room.

1 Billion Monkeys, No Shakespeare

Even if the internet hasn't proven that old saying wrong, this random word generator has:
http://hamete.org/babel/index_en.html
Lots of random word-like sequences, but nothing approaching Hamlet, let alone coherency. It really makes me appreciate the complexities of language, grammar and syntax. Although our language would be much richer if we included words like "avfdhgoot," "hgmff" and "meavx." I intend to start introducing those into my everyday conversation. If mcjob made it into the dictionary, I'm sure I can start a new fad. I'm not sure how many times you need to click the Library of Babel button before it produces actual sentences. Exactly how improbable is the structure of Hamlet anyway? Shouldn't you get "Act one scene one Elsinore Castle Denmark" at least once out every trillion clicks? Maybe chimpanzees and computer programs share an innate hatred of the works of William Shakespeare? Someone should finally train a chimp to type out Hamlet, just to resolve this deeply pressing issue. Preferably an actual chimp, and not one of those Zeebots. Geez, who in the world looks at a poo-flinging primate and says, "That's a nice chimp, but you know what would be cooler? If we gave it ballistic weaponry and onboard tactical AIs. That would be a great use of government funding!"
Dr. Wilde, that's who.
I don't know what's going to happen to those cyborg chimps after the whole ice cream truck fiasco. Nobody wants an ape that's been trained to shoot people. I don't think they can remove enough of the weaponry to make the chimps safe in zoos. Where do you send crazy weaponized/radioactive/superpowered apes anyway? None of the news articles are saying where they're keeping the Zeebots, mostly because they don't want Dr. Wilde breaking them out. But are you allowed to keep them in a pound? A research facility? A zoo? A veterinary lab? Dr. Wilde is the only one I can think of who would actually want to live with those chimpanzees, and he's still on the most wanted list. Who can provide a safe, loving and law-abiding home to three deadly gun-toting cyborg chimpanzees?

Winter Wonderland

The moment one dumb superhero misuses her powers, pundits like Angela Slater start clamoring about how dangerous we are, and how we shouldn't be sharing air with honest-to-goodness Real Americans because we are walking doomsday devices who could lose control at any moment, endangering kittens, apple pie and blue-eyed babies. Geez, no wonder the woman has to live in a virtual fortress. Does she not understand that she is insulting SUPERVILLAINS while simultaneously alienating the people who can protect her from supervillains? Wait, nevermind, I retract the question. She clearly thinks we're ALL supervillains.
The problem isn't one that can be solved by declaring superhumans too dangerous to live, and imprisoning us all for the Greater Good. That would just result in ALL superhumans either going stealth, or going supervillain, and amplifying the problem. The way to fix this sort of crap is to offer better training for superheroes. Granted, a villain or two will attend the seminars and pick up some tricks, but for the most part, better information about superpowers will make life safer for both the people with the powers, and the people within range of said powers. Less kids discovering the hard way what triggers their heat ray vision, and less massive screwups on the part of the heroes. Windigo's not bad at using her powers. In fact, she can control impressive amounts of wind. She is, however, stupid at using her powers. Her ineptness really undermines her natural strength and her skill. Someone really should sit her down for Aerodynamics 101.
It's not enough to be able to control my powers. I have to understand what makes them tick. It will be very useful for me to know about stuff like freezing points of common materials, and Celsius-Fahrenheit conversions, no matter what I choose to do with my powers. And also I need to know what's out there in the world of ice-themed stuff before I pick my name. So about once a week I intend to post some trivia about ice. And perhaps to maintain appropriate alliteration, I should post this on Wednesdays.
On that note... Behold! Pentagonal ice chains!
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-04/uol-sdp040709.php
Mmm, sciency! I have no idea what this means. But it might result in five-sided stars coming into fashion for cryogenetics, which would be a refreshing break. It looks like scientists are trying to control the weather again. Less hail in the winter, more rain in the summer, it all sounds good. Until they accidentally spawn another Elemental and it results in billions of dollars of property damage. Or someone like Weather Witch gets hold of it and starts a drought. Again.
The part about studying water-condensation on the nano-scale sounded intriguing, so I iced up a windowpane (after moving my laptop far, far away) and looked at it through my little jeweler's loupe. That's not as irresponsible as it sounds - my door was locked, and that particular window faces into an empty field, and is mostly screened off by several palm trees. Frost patterns are absolutely gorgeous and fractal-ish, but I couldn't get them to go pentagonal. And though I was generating ice on the inside of the window, the outside started sweating too, so that got annoying. I think I'm running a fever, because I couldn't stop shivering. How long has it been since I shivered? I still went to class, though. Might as well share the misery.

Common Cold or Zombie Retrovirus?

Dani came back from that museum science exposition sick. I am watching her carefully in case it's some kind of horrible zombie plague. There was another outbreak of that stuff in France pretty recently. Dani assures me that the exhibits were mostly robotics. A couple of the robots danced, which is always awesome. There were a few chemistry displays, but most of those were in the form of posters and PowerPoints. It's hard to make chemistry sexy, and even harder to truck around all that glassware. I mean, most of the robotics exhibits can walk themselves into the building. I never got any robotics classes in high school (damn you, block schedule!), but I remember being bored stiff by AP Chemistry. Even when we had acids and bases to play with, they were inevitably watered down, and the most you could do with them was produce a white precipitate. We didn't even get to make that chemical that smells like pineapples. To be fair, I totally would have sprayed lockers with it. I remember once I held a glass stirring rod over the Bunsen burner until the flame turned green. It was really cool, but the lab was nearly over and I didn't want to leave a scorching hot glass wand lying around to set things on fire and spark off a doomsday reaction, so I tried to cool it off by running some cold water over it. Thermodynamics 101: sudden temperature changes render brittle solids structurally unstable. So then I had to smuggle the shattered glass wand out of the lab. The only other memorable thing that happened in that class was the godawful cabbage experiment, which I don't actually want to remember.
I fully expect our local tech institute to churn out a few villains. I mean, everyone KNOWS they're making zombies over there. FIR-Tech doesn't have the kind of funding you need for quantum-reactor gene-splicer nanobot-builder equipment, but I expect they'll produce a rampaging robot or two around finals week. Most metatech villains are the ones who lose their funding, get expelled or commit grave breaches of lab protocol that get somebody killed/mutated/infected by alien parasites, but I think FIR-Tech is going to produce more than the odd evil dropout. I kinda see why the government is so interested in keeping tabs on advanced science dropouts. I'm worried that it's a magnet for a lot of the South Florida metatechs, and I'd kind of like them to fight on the side of good.
Some people say metatechs don't count as real supers, but in my books a raygun and a pair of rocket boots gets you entry to the subculture, if not the technical definition. I kind of think of them like cyborgs: not superhumans per se, but very similar, and there is some definite overlap between the categories. Some metatechs are actually supers. WonderSmith had superstrength, even though nobody seems to remember it. Some people are supers, cyborgs and metatechs at the same time, like Pygmalion back in the day. And quite a few metatechs wind up going cyborg in the end. Besides, a lot of metatechs have some form of superpower that they use the gadgets to boost. Chiro's got to have some basic levitation ability, since those wings don't look like they could support her weight. I think they're mostly for changing direction. The metatechs that really annoy me are the ones who wear exoskeletons that mimic the exact same powers that they sneer at when superhumans have them. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Vector. You don't have some sort of moral high ground just because Velocity was born with her powers and you had the resources to build yours. And don't even get me started on The Kelvinator.

This Looks Like a Job For... Somebody Else!

Someone robbed a Walgreen's today. I called Dani as soon as I heard the news, but she had her phone off. It wasn't the one she works at anyway. Of course, I didn't hear about it until it was over. Where would I even get a police scanner? Even the police got there after everything was over, because crime happens quickly and the police can't teleport. I hear the military's working on it, but so far it seems cost-prohibitive and dangerous. Officially, they're up to teleporting rats. However, since the teleportation booths they've developed can only work in a vacuum, I'm guessing they're just teleporting dead rats. Who probably explode half the time. So yeah, they've got nothing on the natural teleporters.
But back to my problems- if I should go superhero, how would I be able to find out about crimes and get there in time to stop them? Patrol is right out. I'm not one of those wall-crawling, roof-running jocks, and I can't fly. I hate jogging (even though I don't sweat anymore). I don't think surveillance is the answer- questions of ethics aside, it's expensive, impractical and liable to get me caught, not to mention brought up on criminal charges myself. How do the superheroes do it? Enhanced senses? Telepathy? Precog sidekick? Luck?
Yet another obstacle. Sometimes I think being a villain would be easier.