Hot weather

For those of you who haven't been watching the weather down my way, which I assume is all of you, it's been damn hot! The lowest expected temperature for the next few days is to be 18 C, that will be tonight, probably during one of the predicted thunderstorms. The daytime highs are about 30 C constantly now, which is just unpleasant with the humidity here (at least for someone who became accustomed to droughts in Alberta).

On a funny note today a few of us in the lab tried a little educational game on the National Geographic web page. The geography challenge was particularly aimed at identifying the states in the US. Well under the time limit I did rather well, I felt, getting 33 or the 50 states (though I may have run out of time before I ran out of states). I was only beaten by one member of the lab (3 others tried the game), she got 34 or 35 states. Of the two members that I beat one is from Honduras, the other is American (I beat her only by 1 or 2). So just for kicks I had them try the Canadian one...it's so sad...apparently Alberta may actually be in the east (specifically Quebec), Quebec is the new name for Ontario, god only knows what happened to the Atlantic provinces. Actually when I had one girl try to name them, she's live along the US border most of her life, she almost called the province of Ontario; Montreal. They kind of laughed about the lack of knowledge and didn't really care, saying that it wasn't all that important. But how important is it that I know where Idaho is? Yet I do. Considering that I have never had a formal education on US geography I did really well just from common knowledge that I had acquired over the years. But I guess being as self-centered/isolationist as the US can be they really have no clue what's out there. And remember here these are graduate students, this isn't a schmuck on the street.

Even scarier was when we did world countries. There they even miss-fired on IRAQ!!! Ok they came close, I think they hit Iran...does that count as a pre-emptive strike? But it wasn't a case of missing the click, it was a serious case of doubt and guess that got them to Iran. I don't really know what to say there, maybe I'm expecting too much from people, maybe even the Canadians can't find Iraq (try the game and let me know) but it worries me greatly that the educated people, those that I find intelligent to talk to, still have issues with this. Admittedly this was far from being a scientific test, but who knows...