J. Michael Andresen

Our dishwasher stopped working last week. The indicator light was not on, and the dishwasher would not start. I set aside a few hours on Saturday to frustrate myself before calling a professional repairman today. Of course I started by turning off electricity to the dishwasher. This was a little complicated, because I didn't know which circuit controls the dishwasher. The normal thing to do is to flip each circuit breaker off one by one until the dishwasher turns off. Since the dishwasher wasn't working, though, I had no easy way to test which circuit was supplying power. I ended up adopting a conservative route and switching the two circuit breakers controlling the outlets in the kitchen and the garbage disposal right next to the dishwasher. I didn't know which, but I knew that one of those two would kill power to the dishwasher. I put on my incredibly-dorky-yet-quite-helpful halogen headlamp and got down on hands and knees to take off the bottom panel. Within 90 seconds,

This is a hilarious YouTube clip, from a blog called Fail Blog . Thanks to Rachel for the pointer! The blog is really, really funny. This is a related clip from the same blog, involving tubing through the streets in the aftermath of Hurricane Fay. It reminds me of going ice skating through the streets of Dayton, Minnesota one day during my elementary school years when we had enough freezing rain to coat the road with a thick layer of ice:

Reuben Smeed (1909-1976) was a British statistician who analyzed how bombing patterns during World War II affected the likelihood of being shot down. After the war he studied traffic patterns and made a discovery that I find quite amazing. Smeed discovered that the number of traffic fatalities in a given region depends on two things: the number of people and the number of cars. The fatality rate is not influenced by improvements in automobile safety or by what traffic laws are put in place. Smeed's Law asserts that the number of deaths is governed by this equation, where D is deaths, n is number of cars, and p is the number of people: This law has held true since the start of the 20th century, when automobiles had no seat belts or safety glass. It is true (or within a factor of two) during any time period in nearly all countries studied carefully. How can that make sense? Smeed suggested that inherent aspects of human psychology regulate the death rate in a way that does not depe

I alluded to Katie's wonderful smile yesterday, but it's really only so captivating when she is distracted or caught unawares. When a camera is knowingly pointed at her and she is asked to smile, her facial muscles (the zygomaticus muscles in particular, which pull up the corners of the mouth) have major dysregulatory issues. Sometimes they are hyperactive, giving the deranged toothy grin that graces many of our wedding photos: Sometimes they are hypoactive, giving a sullen scowl. An example from last year, when we went out to dinner with friends Eric and Sarah before taking in a show: I took 2 pictures to be sure to have one that turned out well. Perhaps I should have taken 20. Notice the lovely smiles on Eric and Sara, while Katie looks like she's swallowed a lemon!

I'm looking forward to the first big winter storm. We've had a few flurries and dustings of snow that last a day or two, but nothing big. To whet my appetite, here are some videos from a family sledding trip from last December. It was a beautiful snowy day on Christmas, and we went sledding and then horsed around in a playground. Here's Tina sledding down and making a perfect beeline for Jeremiah. He parries her thrust by adroitly leaping over her. Here's Katie trying desperately to sled down the hill but instead sledding right in front of me (on the side of the hill). Close-up at the end of her stunningly beautiful smile. Could I have helped falling in love with a face so winsome? (Also visible in the photo above!) Here's Jeremiah trying to give Missy an extra push down the hill but instead flipping her over. RATING: PG-13 for subsequent language. Here's Katie and me on separate sleds but holding hands. When we get to the bottom, the camera crew directs us to k

I have been seriously swamped and falling behind in my goal of three posts per week. I will try to catch up forthwith! For my last post, I was doing a little bit of procrastinating while slogging through some writing that needed doing for work. (I really hate writing at work, which might be a surprising revelation given that I voluntarily write in my free time as a hobby blogger. The difference is that when I'm blogging I get to use fun words like "forthwith", but acceptable science writing is very dense and precise which makes it very dry. In blogging, I get to use synonyms if I'm talking about the same thing for a few paragraphs. In science writing, it's expected that you use the same term as many times as you need to: the most accurate term must be the best term, no matter how redundant or boring it makes the text sound.) My usual place to go is to watch the previous night's episode of The Daily Show, but Katie and I have been doing a good job of late watch

Barack Obama has prevailed in his bid for the White House. This has seemed likely for some time, but was a bold call back in December. Yet, 8 of the 27 entrants picked him on question 10 of the 2008 Prognostication Quiz . (I was one of the 12 people who picked Hilary Clinton to prevail.) The early Obamaniacs were Jeremiah, Laura, Pete, Tina, Ryan, Eric, Jodene, and Rob. While Obama's win was easily predicted since the last Quiz update , we have had a much bigger development on another front. The Economist has finally published its latest democracy index report . That means that we will have an answer to question one after all. I had given up on the democracy index report being published at all this year. Here are the bottom five from the previous report: North Korea 1.03 Central African Republic 1.61 Chad 1.65 Togo 1.75 Myanmar (Burma) 1.77 Here is the summary of the best and worst democracies as of September, according to The Economist : As you see, three countries (North Korea,

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