More sports than news...

In baseball yesterday, Boston beat Oakland 8-2 after the Red Sox lit up Oakland's bullpen with 6 runs in the 8th. Baltimore started strong in their game in Texas, but things fell apart for the O's starting around the 3rd. They gave up 8 runs in the 4th, and wound up losing the game 6-19. Ian Kinsler managed to bat around and went 6-for-6 in the game, becoming the first player to accomplish that task since 1894. Toronto bounced back from their extra innings loss by pummeling the Twins 12-2. 4 of the Blue Jays hit homers, and they had pretty solid scoring all through the game. Their record improved to 7-3 with the win.

Seattle beat the visiting Angels 11-3 in a game that had some historic hits. Ken Griffey, Jr., hit his 400th home run in a Mariners uniform. Also, Ichiro returned to the Seattle lineup after spending the first 8 games of the season on the DL. He hit a grand slam in the 7th to tie the record for the most professional hits by a Japanese player, with 3085. That includes a single he hit earlier in the game. He's well on his way toward that typical 200 hits per season record, going 2-for-5 in the game.

That leaves the AL West standings as follows:
Seattle 7-2
Oakland 4-5
Texas 4-5
LA Angels 3-5

Hockey playoffs started yesterday. I watched most of the two games that were on. Aside from the fact that I like Montreal and I want Detroit to lose, I don't really have a whole lot of teams I'm really following this year. I guess I'll go for Vancouver in the West, since I think it would be kind of cool to have an all-Canadian Stanley Cup final.

Anyway, Pittsburgh beat Philly 4-1, and New Jersey beat Carolina by the same score. The Rangers edged Washington 4-3, and Vancouver beat St. Louis 2-1. Of those, the Rangers were the only road team to win. The remaining series begin tonight, and of course the game I'd really like to see (Montreal vs. Boston) isn't going to be televised. Damn it...

The girlfriend and I watched the new episode of Mythbusters last night as something of an interlude to the hockey games. It was the second Alaska special, and they oddly only did two myths this time around. Usually they manage to get in at least three, but I guess these were larger ones than usual. The "kids" did the myth of a car that hit a parked snowplow directly on the point of its wedge-shaped plow. This supposedly split the car in two, and the passenger and driver both walked away unharmed. While the second crash, at 70 MPH into a reinforced and sharpened snowplow, was incredibly dramatic to watch, there ain't no way that anyone would have walked away from it unharmed. Probably not at all. It was almost disturbing, actually.

And the main myth was about the substance called Pykrete. During World War II, a British engineer named Pyke (I forget his first name) came up with the idea of creating some aircraft carriers out of a substance he named for himself, Pykrete. Basically, it's sawdust mixed with water and then frozen. Apparently, according to the tests done by Adam and Jamie, the stuff is much stronger than regular ice. A one-inch thick slab secured by clamps at one end held approximately 350 pounds of weight and still took a few hits with a hammer to break, as opposed to a similar piece of ice which broke after only 40 pounds. And bullet tests showed that the Pykrete was seriously bullet resistant, losing a conical chunk an inch or so deep to a point-blank 45-caliber shot, compared to a piece of ice which pretty much just turned into a snow cone when hit with the bullet. The Pykrete also took significantly longer to melt than regular ice. Jamie made a serious improvement to several of these properties by substituting newspaper for the sawdust in Pykrete. This made it less like particle board and more like plywood.

For their main experiment, the two went to Ketchikan, Alaska, and got a group of lucky high school students to soak a bunch of newspaper in water. This was then layered into a plywood mold and frozen solid in a freezer truck. A motor and steering were mounted to it, and it scooted along the bay quite well before melting down too much to remain structurally sound. So, the myth was considered plausible, but impractical.

Now, my complaints, or comments, at least. One was that they commented that this was the first boat like that made, but I think they actually did make a demo model of such a boat in Canada during World War II. I'll look for the details, but I seem to remember seeing something about them making a demo version but finally deciding that it wouldn't be ready in time to be very useful. I don't recall if that's the whole reason, but I think it was most of it. And the second comment, made by Jamie, was that a carrier made of this stuff wouldn't work very well because it would melt in the tropics. But that wasn't the original intent of the idea. It wasn't supposed to be an all-purpose carrier that would go anywhere. It was originally intended to be a nearly stationary platform which would close the gap in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where U-boats roamed at will because of the limited range of Allied patrol and antisubmarine aircraft. And the carriers would also be much larger than their little boat, plus it wouldn't be traveling through the water at much speed. Thus, for a particular purpose, namely being a fairly stationary base in the middle of the North Atlantic, they would have been quite feasible.

In addition to watching Mythbusters, we watched Toy Story before going to bed. I hadn't seen it before. Kind of a cute story, and it seems to have actually held up pretty well in the twelve or so years since it was made. Certainly not something I'm going to watch over and over, but I'd definitely recommend it to someone with a little kid...

And now, I need to get off my ass and go fill out some more applications. Damn it...