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I just booked a ticket to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor on May 31st from the Kennedy Space Center.  I am going to call tomorrow to confirm my ticket.   I’ve had a life-long dream to see a shuttle launch and I’m really hoping the launch date doesn’t get pushed back.

I traded in my Toyota RAV4 and picked up the new Prius this afternoon at 2:00. Earlier at lunch, I was heading to a restaurant to meet Nate when the ‘check engine’ light on my  RAV4 came on.  Since I knew that I’d only be the owner of the RAV4 for the next 2 hours, I thought the timing was pretty awesome.   The only way it could have been better was if the light turned on as I rolled onto the dealer’s parking lot.

I’m planning on reading the owner’s manual tonight and will give some feedback after I’ve driven the car for a few days.  The one thing that was weirding me out on the drive from the dealer to my office was the fact that the car was totally silent when I stopped at a light since the engine gets automatically shut off.

For the last year or so, I’ve been going back and forth in my head about getting a new car. My 2002 Toyota RAV-4 has treated me well over the last 6.5 years (except for the occasional mocking comments from my wife and friends that it is totally a chick car), but at 161,000 miles it now is in need of a bunch of work.     Finding out last week that the air-conditioning is dead has finally pushed me past my indecision point and I went to the Toyota dealership today and placed my order.  I should take possession of a 2008 Prius on next Monday.

I look forward to trying to game the gas mileage as much as I can with the cool feedback system and will do my best not to be “that jerkwad  guy driving the Prius asking why you hate the environment”.

I was hitting Gerrit’s blog and came across an entry that talked about freerice.com. It is an ad-supported site with a bit of a twist. It gives you a vocabulary quiz and for each word you know the definition of the site donates 20 grains of rice towards the UN world food program. The site FAQ calculates that they have donated about 28 billion grains so far. I played the vocab game for about 10 minutes and learned a bunch of new words. The only downside was that when I decided to switch to something else, I got a bit of a guilty feeling that by quitting now some poor kid would stay hungry. Oh well, I think I earned someone a meal’s worth. Not sure how effective it is, but I like the concept.

Another cool semi-related item I heard about was the PlayPump.  It mates a big strong metal wheel that kids can play on with a water pump.  As the kids (or adults) turn the wheel, it helps pull up clean water from a well.  This saves a lot of time in places where people otherwise would need to walk down to a river and carry water up by hand.  Getting clean water reduces a lot of water-born diseases and also frees people up to do other things like attending school.

I was playing racquetball at LA Fitness on Wed night with Mark and Ryan and got accidentally hit in the head. My protective glasses caught the brunt of the force and I lucked out that only the string portion of the racket directly hit my skin. Unfortunately, the string portion flying at 60 MPH was enough to some create cuts on my forehead. The cuts was initially bleeding fairly quickly and one of the LA Fitness workers saw me and told me to head to the front desk where they had a medical kit. I walked over to the desk and asked the two women working there if I could have the medical kit. One responded by saying something like “ohmygod! ohmygod! I can’t stand blood! You handle it!” and waving her arms. The other woman looked at me and after about 30 seconds said I should probably go get a towel. I walked over to the locker room to take a look.

When I first looked in the mirror, I was a bit concerned because a lot of blood had gathered around my left eye, and I wasn’t sure what the damage was. I used some water and paper towels to clean up the blood and the cuts didn’t look as bad as I feared; there were two slightly ragged cuts about 1/2″-3/4″ long on my forehead ,and a bruise/bump was already forming around the cuts. Mark and Ryan popped into the locker room a few seconds later. An LA Fitness staff member (who apparently CAN handle the sight of blood) helpfully brought some gauze, tape, and alcohol swabs. I cleaned the wounds with the alcohol and taped the gauze over the cuts. When we checked a few minutes later, the bleeding had almost completely stopped.

We had a bit of a discussion on whether it was worth going to an emergency room to have a doctor determine if stitches were necessary. I decided I should go to the emergency room since if I didn’t go and the cuts did not heal cleanly, I would regret it. Ryan lives within two blocks of the Pinnacle Health Hospital in Harrisburg, so he kindly offered to wait in the ER with me.

We drove to Ryan’s and walked into the ER. There were about 25 people waiting, all in various states of discomfort and/or boredom. One person looked like they were having a migraine attack (which made me feel bad since there were some screaming kids in the waiting area too). The triage desk had a sign saying to tell the triage nurse if you had something really serious (chest pain, etc), otherwise take a number and wait to get triaged. It took about an hour for my number to get called. I went into the interview room and the nurses said that for my very minor injury I would get “fast-tracked” and it shouldn’t take long. They took down my basic name/contact info and my blood pressure,pulse, and temperature. They thought I would also get a tetanus shot since my last one was decades ago. I head back to the waiting area to get called again.

About 20 minutes later, a hospital worker called out my name. Sweet! Faster than I thought. At this point Ryan headed home. I followed the hospital worker about 15 feet and we went to a window where she took my health insurance info and co-pay ,and finished the admittance process. She then gave me a restaurant style buzzer and sent me back to the waiting area. Not quite as sweet.

After another 20 minutes went by, a nurse walked in and called out my name. Apparently the buzzer information wasn’t entered correctly. The nurse escorted me back to one of the medical examination areas. A doctor came by a few minutes later and took a look at my head. He said the cuts were pretty superficial and he would just use some steri-strips to close them.  He came back a few minutes later and put the strips on and then the nurse came over and injected me with the tetanus shot.   The shot itself didn’t hurt at all, but the nurse warned me that it would probably ache the next day or two and I might run a slight fever.  At that point I just needed to sign a few pieces of paper and was able to head home.

Thursday update: I’m happy I can’t really see any bruising, but there is a definite bump  around the cuts.  The cuts don’t hurt unless I am wrinkling my brow.  My left shoulder where I got the tetanus shot is VERY sore.    I think I am going to lay off the aerobic exercise for a few days so I don’t accidentally cause the bandages to come off due to sweating. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better after the weekend.

Today, while eating lunch with my friends/coworkers, we had an interesting discussion about morals in different situations. I remembered reading about a morality quiz a week or two ago. Some quick googling found the quiz at philosophersnet called Morality Play. I spent about two minutes flipping through some questions, and it made me squirm.

Before starting the quiz, I thought my own sense of morals was fairly rational and self-consistent. As I clicked through the questions,I could see my answers waver in response to very minor differences in what was fundamentally the same basic scenario. I found this both mildly disturbing and humbling. A few of my coworkers tried the quiz and became so uncomfortable that they had to stop part way through.

Sample Question

Q: A charity collection takes place in your office. For every UK£10.00 given, a blind person’s sight is restored. Instead of donating UK£10.00, you use the money to treat yourself to a cocktail after work. Are you morally responsible for the continued blindness of the person who would have been treated had you made the donation?

A. Responsible/Partly Responsible/Not Responsible

What do you find out?

If you complete the quiz, it presents a report of what factors you tend to consider when making moral decisions. The factors that this quiz measured are:

• Geographical distance (someone next door versus the other side of the world)
• Family Relatedness (your mother or child versus a stranger)
• Acts and Omissions (if performing an action is better/worse than doing nothing)
• Scale (hurting 1 to save 10 different than hurting 500 to save 50000)
• Cultural distance (someone from a similar culture versus a very different culture)

I really recommend you give the quiz a shot, it takes about 10 minutes and definitely will get you thinking.

I spent a bit of time this weekend watching some amazing videos from the TED conference archives. There is a wide range of topics available. I particularly enjoyed:

• Steve Johnson’s presentation on the story of a cholera outbreak in 1854 London and the major breakthrough in understanding about how cholera spread and could be stopped.
• David Gallo showing some bio-luminescent deep-sea creatures and mind-blowing examples of camouflage (the best parts are towards the end).
• Alan Russell talks about regenerative medicine, showing some really cool early results.

I also read an interesting NY Times article by Steven Pinker called “The Moral Instinct” that explores how morals differ from other opinions we hold about proper behavior and some questions that help you analyze your own values.

When I got home last night I saw a note that Fedex had attempted a delivery.  I was curious what was being sent to me since I wasn’t expecting anything.  I drove down to the local Fedex facility to pick up the package and to my surprise it was a 16GB iPod Touch that my company had sent as a gift for being an employee for 10 years.  It is sweet! The eye-candy is amazing, it has good storage space (I can finally sync all my music), and the wifi connectivity for browsing is fun.

Not much traffic and plenty of ridiculously cheap parking (which I suppose drastically changes on days their baseball team is playing).

There is a park that runs along the river for about a mile and a half which is pretty nice for running (although it is almost all concrete).

If you are a Brazilian Steakhouse fan (or a carnivore in general), Boi na Braza does a pretty decent job, although it still doesn’t top the reigning champ (and holder of most of my expense money) Fogo de Chao.

Fountain Square has a jumbo-tron and a lot of lighted outdoor seating with free wifi. When I walked by tonight they were showing a football game on the huge screen.

Just across the river is Newport on the Levee, a big shopping/food/entertainment complex with a large aquarium.  If you don’t have a car you can walk across one of the bridges or take the TANK shuttle for $1.25.

My friend Jon Laman just ran his first ultra-marathon today, the Blues Cruise 50k (31.1 mile) trail race near Reading, PA.   You can check out the motionbased stats for his race.  Way to go Jon!