The Blog of Siram

Behold, Some Code!

2011-07-12T22:05:00.000-04:00

Since my life reboot, my leet code skillz have gone to whole new levels. Here's a representation of the kinds of things I've been doing for the past three months:

s = 1; %blort-cell counter
interpnum = cell(1,6);
for t = {East_u, North_v, Vert_w, VelError, Mag, DIR}
    blort = t{1};
    k = 1; %within blort-cell counter
    for i = 1:length(SerYear)
        badeast = find(isnan(blort(i,:)));
        for j = 1:length(badeast)
            m = badeast(j);
            while isnan(blort(i, m))
                if m > 1
                    m = m - 1;
                else
                    break
                end
            end
            n = badeast(j);
            while isnan(blort(i, n))
                if n < SerBins(end)
                    n = n + 1;
                else
                    break
                end
            end
            interpnum{s}(k, 1) = i;
            interpnum{s}(k, 2) = badeast(j);
            if n - m < 5 && ~isnan(blort(i, m)) && ~isnan(blort(i, n))
                interpnum{s}(k, 3) = interp1([m n], [blort(i, m) blort(i, n)], badeast(j));
            elseif n - m < 5 && isnan(blort(i, m)) && ~isnan(blort(i, n))
                interpnum{s}(k, 3) = blort(i, n);
            elseif n - m < 5 && ~isnan(blort(i, m)) && isnan(blort(i, n))
                interpnum{s}(k, 3) = blort(i, m);
            else
                interpnum{s}(k, 3) = NaN;
            end
            k = k + 1;
        end
        clear badeast j m n
    end
    clear i blort k
    s = s+1;
end
badeast = interpnum{1};
badnorth = interpnum{2};
badvert = interpnum{3};
baderr = interpnum{4};
badmag = interpnum{5};
baddir = interpnum{6};
clear s t interpnum

It looks at a big block of numbers, one row at a time, and interpolates for any missing values - assuming that there are no more than four missing in a row (in the row). It does this for six individual same-sized blocks.

It's in Matlab. There might actually be a simpler way to do this, but if so I don't know about it. (Obviously.) The fun part is: it only took me two days to work all that out. Leet skillz progress! :D

Things Learned from a Gulf of Mexico Science Conference

2011-05-20T00:07:00.000-04:00

One

The preliminary results are in on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

There basically wasn't any hugely negative impact to wildlife in the immediate aftermath of last summer's oil spill. Some stuff died because the oil was toxic, but other stuff stepped right up because the oil was food. A lot of stuff that looked like it ought to be affected ... wasn't. The stuff that was knocked down recovered within a few months after they capped it. In short, some short-term changes in ecological composition occurred, but no overall increases or decreases of anything.

Also, commercially important fish had an outstanding year due to the lack of commercial fishing.

This is not to say that the Gulf ate the oil and is just fine now. Although there weren't immediate effects, the oil is still there and will likely have longer-term chronic effects. Some fisheries might not collapse until a couple years later, depending on how long the life cycles work for the seafood involved.

Two

The next time I find myself on the job market, all I really have to do is show up to a science conference and talk to people about what I can do with their CTD data. Voila, jobs will magically appear! Send out resumes? Phhht.

New Chapters Begin, Old Chapters End

2011-05-16T22:49:00.000-04:00

In mid-2008, my friend Robert talked me into signing up at eHow to write articles. He was making some serious pocket money and thought I could too.

Two years, ten months, and 44 articles later, I have $478.57 more than I did before. Some articles made a lot - one of them over $130. Others made diddly squat. In the process, I learned all sorts of things about freelance writing for content sites. Most importantly:

A whole lot of people make living-level wages doing it, for example this guy. Over at Demand Studios, the people who qualify to write the $30 medical/health articles, and who can crank out 10 of them per day, 6 days per week, from home while watching their toddlers, and without having to do any of the pitching/rejection of traditional freelancing, those people have it pretty good.

I'm never going to be one of them. In the end, I'm just not that fast.

So, what's next? Who knows. I sure know lots more about SEO than I did before. But not enough about any actual topic to write a good-sized website of my own. My friend Robert keeps trying to talk me into making one about something marine biology related, but I've long since passed into the "I know enough to know I don't know anything" phase about that.

In the meantime, Bright Hub is reeling but still standing after the Google Panda smackdown, most of my extant articles are now there (including several of the eHow refugees I had to move in the past ten days), so maybe I'll just watch what happens for a while...

A Tall Shorebird

2011-05-14T01:07:00.001-04:00

Coastal Alabama has a lot of birds of all kinds. Here's one I saw yesterday morning:

It's a great blue heron. Very common over most of North America. This one let us get real close. There were four of us out there talking, and it just stood there, so I took a picture. :)

Newest Toy

2011-05-08T23:26:00.003-04:00

When the apartment management first told me about my new apartment, they said it wouldn't have any washer/dryer connections. But after I moved down here, they neglected to tell me that there were washer/dryer connections after all - and they especially didn't mention it was going to cost me an extra $10 per month.

Right around the same time, someone mentioned how they'd just bought a small portable washer. Just like a regular-sized washer, they said, but smaller! Possibly small enough that even I can move it by myself! (This is a plus because I'm a firm believer in only having furniture and appliances that I can personally move by myself.)

And so, after some shopping around I bought:

It's a Haier pulsator portable washer. It turns out that I can lift the thing, but just in case I can't it comes with wheels. It's also a lot more roomy on the inside than it looks because it doesn't have that big column thingy up the middle. It's also cute. Cuteness is key when it comes to wanting to do laundry. :)

Life is Grand Again

2011-04-30T12:24:00.002-04:00

Part of my view into work:

Yes, I think in terms of workplace, I've definitely traded up. :)

Also, in the hopes that I really am about to resurrect this blog, a picture of a cat:

Specifically, it's this cat. I got back in touch with his owner, who sent me a more recent picture. Ten years later he's doing well and looks the same. :)

From GA to AL via IN

2011-04-09T01:26:00.003-04:00

BEFORE

I loved my work and my boss, I liked most of my coworkers, and I had come to hate my workplace.

AFTER

I'm doing the same work that I still love, so far I like my boss and coworkers, and I love my workplace.

All in all, despite two very strange years in between, I think I've traded up. :)

An Idea for Modern Education

2011-01-28T13:23:00.004-05:00

Step One

Do a traditional lecture on the topic.

Step Two

Assign standard homework. But for each question, ask where and how students arrived at their answers.

You can hope all you want that students will learn the material by attending your lectures, reading things you've assigned them to read, and getting a broad background on the topic from which they can draw to answer specific questions. But this is a day and age where they will just copy/paste the entire question into a search engine (including any misspellings). And there are lots and lots of people on the Internet who will happily write a direct answer to it if enough students input the exact same one. Yay for SEO longtails and ad revenue share.

Step Three

Do a second lecture about all the online sources on the topic that students have found. "This one is right because..." "This one is wrong about..."

In this way, not only do they still learn the actual material, they also get some insight into evaluating sources on their own. And you learn where all the cheat sources are without having to look yourself. Win-win? :)

Note: I have no education background whatsoever except as a student.

2010 Retrospective

2011-01-01T02:07:00.000-05:00

In January, I was still receiving unemployment money while sending out job applications and receiving rejections. I was in the middle of sorting through nearly two decades' worth of life's paperwork detritus and preparing for a move, whenever that might be. I was waffling about where I wanted to go with content-site freelance writing. It passed the time while I waited for the next part of my path to magically appear, but was it worthwhile to do? Was I in or out on the challenge Bright Hub laid out for me with their new standards? Could any of this possibly make me a living?

In March, my friends with the seafood market invited me to move into their house and (more or less) join their family.

In April, eHow's WCP shut down, Demand Studios invited me in in its place, Bright Hub was really starting to grow on me, and all signs pointed to Go on the freelance writing.

In May, I moved from Savannah to Indiana. Then I spent the next five weeks in Taiwan, two weeks in Hong Kong, and half a week in San Francisco. I went places, saw longlost relatives, and met new people (including my niece). It was both a vacation and a form of imprisonment as I couldn't go anywhere or do anything without other people's approval.

In July, I finally completed my move to Bloomington. Bright Hub promoted me to Senior Writer (so I met and surpassed the challenge of their standards). Between them and Demand, I started making about half the money I needed to go back to living independently.

In September, I got a job: to go out on boats in the Gulf of Mexico in support of NOAA's oil spill damage assessment. I went on three cruises before fall sampling shut down for the winter.

In December, after weeks of no word from the cruise people, I began wondering whether I'd done such a terrible job that I would never hear from them again. Even though I know there's nothing going on until spring sampling begins. Writing continued in the meantime to pass the time.

And now we're back to January. I'm still living in someone else's house. Nearly all my stuff is packed away in storage. I'm doing really well at Bright Hub, and Bright Hub is doing extremely well on the searchable internet.

Where am I going next? Well, if all goes according to plan, I'll be working a lot of cruises in the spring and summer, and writing in between - both for Bright Hub and fiction. If all doesn't go that well, Demand Studios is still there as the backup plan. Will my finances become stable enough to move back out to a place of my own? I think that's the goal for 2011. I guess we'll see what happens from here.

Ahh, Prejudice

2010-10-25T10:45:00.002-04:00

On the one hand, I'm really flattered that someone could be so comfy including me in their "us" category that they'll use words like "fag" while talking about their "them" categories. I haven't been part of any offline "us" categories in years.

On the other hand... well... umm, "fag." T.T

Slice of Life Reprise

2010-07-19T15:17:00.004-04:00

After having lived for several years in a place where people commonly did their best to avoid acknowledging my existence, I can't say how nice it is to be somewhere where people actually look at me and sometimes even randomly talk to me like I'm a normal person, and where service staff actually want to help me. Even if they're old white people! Thank you, Bloomington Indiana, for reminding me what that's like - and restoring some faith that there are at least small pockets of midwestern U.S. where people are decent, even to people who aren't exactly like them.

(Slice of Life)

Today's Insipid Thought

2010-04-22T19:48:00.001-04:00

At some point your potential is supposed to turn into kinetic. If it hasn't by the time you've reached 30, you've lost it all.

Two Roads Diverge in a Wood, and I

2010-04-11T01:04:00.000-04:00

On one side lies the Science Academia path. I can get another job as a data analyst and continue my endless string of research tech jobs. Or, if I want to actually advance, I can get a PhD in something. So far I've narrowed the "something" down to ecology, which is still kind of broad. Then, once I have a PhD, expectations rise steeply about what I do next: develop a research program and find ways to fund it. This would be exactly what I was avoiding for the past ten years.

On the other side lies Freelance Writing. Bright Hub has seemingly endless stuff for me to do, and it's certainly a place where I can help them grow. There are lots of other content sites I can write for as well. For that matter there's "real" freelance writing where I query to write stuff for a lot more money than content sites pay. The pay is very low at the start, but then there are my friends with the seafood market who have offered to let me move into their house for free room and board - so I'll stop having any living expenses to speak of. And just as I was waffling about where I should go, eHow folded up its ad-revenue-share program, and suddenly I'm a part of Demand Studios. Suddenly I can actually make decent money at this.

To go one way, I'd really need to find the right kind of passion for my work. Good scientists don't just go to work, they live and breathe what they study. I don't have that.

To go the other way, I'll basically lose all my credentials to go back to science later. My degrees are already stale, and my leet skillz will go too. I won't be able to go back.

Two roads diverging. I can't keep going up the middle or I'll just hit a tree. I don't know that the one I'm choosing is the less travelled, but it certainly seems to be the path of least resistance.

March articles

2010-04-01T19:07:00.006-04:00

My friends with the seafood market have managed to drag me into helping them on the busier weekends, and also at month starts when they have huge hordes of rabid customers rushing to spend their EBT funds. March was extra busy because of Lent, when people stop eating land meat and therefore more seafood. Plus they were down a worker who had to be out of town all month. So, all in all, I wasn't online a whole lot.

Still, I managed to write four articles for Bright Hub, one for eHow, and one for Bukisa.

Life Cycle of Seahorses - Seahorses are small fish with a life span of one to five years. The seahorse life cycle includes males that get pregnant, which is as extreme as it gets for male parental care in the animal kingdom.

Intertidal Zone and Habitat Functions of Estuarine Marsh Areas - Salt marshes in estuaries have two main functions of interest to humanity. They provide crucial nursery habitat for the young of a great many fish, shrimp, and crab species that we like to eat. They are also Nature's septic system for all the organic waste we produce farther upstream.

How to get ingredients in Restaurant City - there are six ways. I screenshot them all, including pics from inside mine, Anne's, and Carol Elaine's restaurants. :)

Origin and Phylogeny of Vultures - this one is based on "black vulture phylogeny 'animal diversity web' " which lots of people are running searches on for some reason. So I tried to write an answer. :) There didn't seem to be one when I tried the search myself, at least. (If you've landed here by searching on it, please drop me a comment explaining what you're trying to find, and whether the article I wrote was it... if it isn't, I'd be happy to try again.)

How to set up housing in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom - the second in a four-part strategy guide series I'm working on (apparently at the rate of one per month).

How to remove sticky oil residue from nonstick pans - eHows have the advantage of being quick to write with minimal paperwork overhead fuss. This one, I figured out how to do because I had some uncleanable pans, and then I wrote it down for everyone else.

As for April, so far I've claimed one slot about ecosystem changes. I have lots of ideas for more gaming articles (which, although less fulfilling to write, are a lot faster and certainly entertaining to research...). It all depends how busy the seafood market keeps me.

First Azaleas of 2010

2010-03-23T01:38:00.002-04:00

This is a view of the patch of woods behind my apartment, as seen from my bedroom window on the second floor. It's my daily regular view now that my computer is upstairs.

The splash of purple is one of two big patches of azaleas that began blooming last week. Normally they show up back in February, but we've had an unusually cold winter. So far none of the fenceline flowers have appeared yet (and thus, no closeups).

Some recent thoughts with no particular point

2010-03-09T04:07:00.004-05:00

If we burn the prairie in the fall, the grass will grow better in the spring. This will give the elk and buffalo more to eat, allowing them to grow and multiply. Which means that we, in turn, will also have more to eat.

The above concept comes out of 1491 by Charles C. Mann (p. 279-284) - a great book for short bursts of reading, in that you can turn to just about any page at random, start reading, and learn something interesting about the Americas before 1492. I read the above and thought: Huh. That makes a lot more sense - to work with nature to get what you want, rather than against it, trying to control it. Why don't we do more of that instead?

(Not that that works well in modern-day container gardening, alas. My inclination is to put the plants out there and let nature do whatever it wants. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to give me any tomatoes.)

Then a few days later, I found out via Discover Magazine ("Where the Wild Things Are", March 2010, doesn't appear to be on their website (yet?) dangit) that someone in the Netherlands is trying it out. Or something close to it with the Oostvaardersplassen nature preserve. Basically, put a bunch of large herbivores together, do nothing management-wise, and see what happens. Results so far: you get patches of open forest and grasslands. not unbroken dense forest.

Anyway, like I said in the title, I don't really have a point. I just thought it was kind of cool. :)

Still Dwelling

2010-03-04T01:24:00.001-05:00

You have killed me by Morrissey

I don't share this view of how things ended, but this is how I would respond to it. But then, it's not forgiveness from me that matters.

Articles Written This Month

2010-02-28T16:40:00.001-05:00

I've decided to start a new end-of-month feature - list of articles written that month. Herewith, then, are the articles I wrote in February:

Abiotic (Non-Biological) Factors of an Open Ocean Ecosystem
A Review of Yakuza Lords on Facebook
Arctic Ocean Marine Life
The Dragon Cave: A Review
How to plan your city in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

There was supposed to be one more article about alleles, but it's taking a really long time to make it past the editors. I'm told it'll be up before midnight; we'll see...

I also added some pictures to my micro RNA article from last October: Micro RNA and Gene Expression

My test readers found it confusing when it was just the text. Now they only find it partially confusing. Yay progress! :)

My full list of every article I've ever written is linked to the top left, if anyone is interested.

UPDATE: What Are Alleles? is up now. :) This one was really hard to fit in 500-800 words; either I could answer the title question in 8 words ("alleles are different versions of the same gene") or I could write a textbook about population genetics. In the end I just sort of blathered aimlessly for about 600 words and then stopped there instead of coming to any points. Apparently that was good enough to pass muster at Bright Hub.

And now for something completely different

2010-02-19T00:43:00.006-05:00

I've actually been tired of my old blog template for a really long time now, but was not tired enough to overcome my inherent laziness when it comes to actually changing it. Until now, apparently. Because I just now saw the "Edit Pages" tab and thought: "ooo. I should do something with that."

It occurs to me that both General Comments and My Dragons ought to have been pages, if pages had existed at the time I made those posts. There doesn't seem to be any way to move them over, however.

Anyway: the biggest thing that annoyed me about the previous template was the width. Pictures refused to sit next to each other unless I forced them to - and then they'd go off the edge of the post area. This current template doesn't have that problem, so it's already a step up. :)

I might fiddle with the color scheme later on. Or not. I can feel my inherent laziness already setting back in again....

Things I Ponder

2010-02-16T01:24:00.000-05:00

Would it be better or worse if people could actually talk to other cars on the road? Because, at this point, we've probably reached a point in technology level where we no longer need rely on the honk as our only means of communication.

On the pro side, there could be:

"Your tail light is out."
"You left your gas cap open."
"What's the holdup? Why's nobody moving?" "Because there's a wreck in the intersection."
"All y'all going the other way are about to run into a mile-long jam."

But then, on the con side, there would be:

"You drive like shit." "Fuck you."

Or, for that matter:

"Your tail light is out." "Your tail light is out." "Your tail light is out." "YES I KNOW!"

There could be a way to talk both to individual cars, and to lots of cars at once. But it would have to be quick to pick - trying to type in a license plate number while driving would be a no-go, I think.

Hmmm.

Thought for the Day

2010-02-15T00:16:00.004-05:00

To "agree to disagree" means "I understand and respect your point of view, but I still disagree." Which happens when everyone knows what everyone else thinks and why, and also knows that everyone else knows what they think. Also, that part about respect is kind of key.

This is not the same thing as "Let's just talk about something else now."

My thoughts about Teabaggers and other neoconservatives

2010-02-10T16:08:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time there was an alternative rock band called Creed. They made lots of great music that was very popular.

One Last Breath from Whisper (2001)
Then one day for no apparent reason, they suddenly broke up. Not long after that, like the very next day, there was a new band, called Alter Bridge. Completely different and separate from Creed in every (legal) way.

Open Your Eyes from One Day Remains (2004)
It was made up of every member originally of Creed except one. I guess they didn't want him to be a part of them anymore. And they lived happily ever after.

Somewhere in that tale there's a lesson to be learned, I think. Especially for the current Republican Party.

Note: the above version of events is how I heard it as a casual fan of alternative rock. I'm not a hardcore Creed/Alter Bridge fan and probably there are lots of additional details to the story that aren't accounted for in this post. Also, there's a sequel: five years after they disbanded, they reunited last year. Which could also have analogies to the current GOP after some growth and maturity occurs...

Overcome from Full Circle (2009)

Triumph!

2010-01-28T23:01:00.001-05:00

My quest: To play Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, a game that came out in 2003 and only runs in Windows. (I blame my brother for the existence of this quest.)

The problem: I only have non-Intel Macs.

The goal: Somehow obtain a computer setup that will run the game, as cheaply as possible.

Not having an Intel Mac, the only possible emulation solution was something called VirtualPC, which nobody recommends. However, Shawn Powers had an extra copy lying around, so he sent it to me in the hopes it would help. Alas, it didn't. T.T (But thank you Shawn for trying. This was a year ago and you've probably forgotten all about it by now...)

The next possible solution was to acquire the cheapest possible Windows-running machine. That plan stopped the whole quest for a while, due to the whole spending money thing. I couldn't quite justify to myself that I should spend a few hundred dollars just to play one game. But then Christmas came around again, I went back to the place that had the game, I succumbed to the temptation to play it, and thus: here we are again.

So I shopped around. And found a $200 Acer Nettop. :) In the picture below, it's the small white box between my iMac and the other monitor (also new, for another $110).

It lacks a whole lot of features that most people would want in a computer, and some friends yelled at me thoroughly about the whole plan. I should save up until I can get something better, some said. Or I should just not spend at all, said others. However, it does what I bought it for and I don't need Windows for anything else, now or in the future, so I'm quite happy with it. Plus I hoard quite well the rest of the time, and will make it just fine to my next move (either a new job or, if I still don't have one when my lease here ends, into the house of some friends who have offered to let me stay rent-free). And who knows, maybe I'll run into other Windows-only games. ;)

Package of Sachima: The Sequel

2010-01-22T13:31:00.001-05:00

At the same time that I received a box of sachima from John the Scientist, a couple friends also received packages: Anne got a box of instant ramen, and Michelle got ...tentacles.

Michelle didn't actually want her tentacles, so she sent them to me (so that I could, in turn, donate them to the nearest poor, unfortunate octopus that had lost its tentacles in a terrible accident). Meanwhile, I drooled over one of the ramen brands that Anne got, which inspired John to send me a whole case of it. Thus: triple loot for me. :)

The tentacles have now been reattached to a deserving octopus by a crack team of vet surgeons. Here he is, all happy to be able to catch his own food again:

(Note: any similarities between this octopus picture and those found by googling "plush octopus" are entirely coincidental.)

The ramen has now been sampled, and indeed it is the brand I remember fondly from 15 years ago. :) And the sachima? I'm down to seven of them (out of an original 24). The taro ones (purple) especially are pretty good, though my favorite are still the plain (yay nostalgia ;) ).

And finally, along with tentacles, Michelle sent me one of her old cameras. Now I can finally show everyone what the screen on the broken one looks like:

It started out as all-white with diagonal cracks. As time has gone on, it's been turning into ovals of white with rainbow stripes. Picture taking is still perfectly possible through the viewfinder, as long as you don't care what the camera chooses to focus on, or the exact composition, or changing the flash function, or any of the other settings, or seeing the results instantly...

Grade School Science Fairs

2010-01-21T23:04:00.000-05:00

When I was in 8th grade (age 14), my school held a science fair. My project was about the growth of mold in four different drinks - milk, orange juice, apple juice, and grape juice - in glass bottles that were both capped and uncapped. These resided on a shelf in my bedroom for a month and the smell was terrible, and also I couldn't drink apple juice or grape juice again for a very long time. And I got a D. >.> Being as I was a child of restaurant owners, and being as I was in a college town where half the other kids had university professors for parents, well, my crappy little handwritten poster just didn't look all that good next to, say, the sophisticated microbiology project with the gigantic professional-looking poster with petri plates in front of it. And my grasp of proper scientific format was nonexistent at the time.

All of which came to mind during my second experience with a grade school science fair, which was today. This time, though, I was one of the judges.

The projects were interesting and varied, and about on the same level as my project probably was. They grew plants, grew mold, tested for conductivity in things, tested for differences between different brands of various products (toilet paper was popular for some reason), and also wrote reports about volcanoes. It was fun seeing what their perspective was on things, when they didn't quite have all the knowledge that you'd expect in the average adult. :)

A walk in a park

2010-01-18T22:24:00.000-05:00

Despite having lived in Savannah for 8 years, and even though I used to drive past it every day, I'd never visited the Skidaway Island State Park until today. When I got up, though, it was sunny and warm (60s F / 18ish C). It's also right after a week of below-freezing nighttime temperatures, which means many fewer bugs. And I wanted to be outside. So ...

Coastal Georgia is basically all salt marshes - think of it as a "floodplain" area as the tide goes in and out. In the park, it was mostly filled with Juncus roemerianus (black needlerush). At the edge of the marsh, the treeline pretty much just starts up suddenly where the highest reaches of saltwater ends.

The standard southeastern maritime forest is fairly open with trees spaced far apart (that is, you can see pretty far into it and it's easy to walk through). The tallest are pines, but there's a variety of deciduous and palm-type trees in the midlevels. Saw palmettos stand out as the main part of the understory. The pines have extra-thick bark and there's lots of pine needle litter, which means fire is a part of the ecology.

Far enough inland away from the saltwater, there are shallow freshwater ponds. Some of which are called "sloughs" (sloo). These are a type of wetland. Also, in places where spanish moss is especially thick, the distant forest can look ghostly silvered.

All in all, I walked about 7 miles and saw every part of every trail (almost... would've gotten the last bit too if my legs hadn't wore out). Skidaway Island State Park isn't that big and can easily be seen all in one day. The trails are all flat and wide (would rate "level 1 difficulty"), but then, coastal Georgia is pretty flat. And it turned out to be a good idea to wear my crocs for the venture because I had to wade through some of it (it rained a lot over the weekend).

Shawn Powers

2010-01-18T12:07:00.007-05:00

By now, everyone everywhere has probably heard about Shawn Powers and his family, whose house burned down yesterday. All of their pets died in the fire. Shawn's a friend and fellow UCFer, and much beloved at Linux Journal where he makes many amusing videos.

I can never think of anything to say when things like this happen. But I thought I'd pass along the donation button for people who haven't found it yet.

Some boxplots about baby fish

2010-01-16T18:33:00.003-05:00

It's been a while since I've said anything sciencey here because, well, being laid off from my sciencey day job has kind of drastically reduced (possibly even eliminated) the number of sciencey things I do on a daily basis. However, all is not lost! I can still dig up past sciencey things I've done, such as for my masters thesis. :)

To the right are some pictures of baby fish - five species of Lutjanus snappers that usually live in Florida but had gotten lost in North Carolina at the time they were caught. They were about 1-2 cm long at the time. We caught hundreds of them, mostly L. griseus, during two (non-consecutive) years of sampling with nets. Among other things, we compared their size ranges with each other:

These are box plots. Which is a fun modern statistical way of looking at data besides just getting an average and a standard error or standard deviation (also included, because older scientists who aren't used to fun modern ways prefer to see those there). As you can see, some of them came in bigger than others. :)

This post inspired by Janiece, who is learning about box plots in her statistics class.

Domestic Excavations: One Year Later

2010-01-11T22:34:00.001-05:00

It's now been almost a year since I first started seriously poking through my roomful of old boxes of stuff. A lot has gotten tossed, recycled, or shredded. The harp in one of last year's pictures has been freecycled. Boxes have been emptied, and other boxes have been filled. Stuff has moved into and out of the room from other parts of the apartment. The result so far? I think my stuff is actually multiplying. o.O

At the time I started, I figured it was finally time to unpack everything and settle in. A few months later, however, that turned out to be premature. So while I still unpacked and sorted, I'm also working on repacking it all back up again. Such is the way of my life.

Taking it down to semantics and definitions

2010-01-07T17:30:00.003-05:00

From ABC News:

Efforts to promote 'transgenderism' in public policy deconstruct one of the most fundamental concepts known to mankind. It renders gender, the most basic organization of social systems, completely meaningless. In doing so, activists like Simpson are asking the rest of society to radically reorder the ways in which the culture makes reasonable and rational accommodation for the two genders," [Monica Schleicher, spokeswoman for Christian group Focus on the Family] said.

There's actually a pretty big difference between gender identity and gender role. When transpeople are talking about the topic, they mean identity. When everyone else does, they usually mean role (as Ms. Schleicher does). This conflation is what causes a lot of confusion and frustration, I think.

Firepot

2010-01-06T14:41:00.001-05:00

This is a traditional firepot. Or, well, it's actually a huo guo. Which in Mandarin translates as "fire" and "pot" so my family just calls it a firepot. :) It has space for a small charcoal fire in the bottom part, a donut-shaped bowl for food, and a chimney. The bowl is filled with soup (usually pork broth), and the table is set with platters of raw food that get cooked in the soup as the meal goes. Through the chimney is how the fire gets stirred and more charcoal added.

Food items include thinly sliced raw meats, green leafy things like spinach and cabbage, tofu, fish balls, other seafood, and things along those lines. Each eater gets a plate with some soy sauce, sesame oil, and sometimes other sauces (we use a lot of sah tsa, which I have no idea how to describe). The meal ends with putting mei fun into the pot, and a bowl on the chimney to smother the fire (if it hasn't already gone out).

Firepot is what we do for festive occasions (in much the same way that most Americans of the dominant culture have turkey on Thanksgiving). Nowadays, because people are more worried about fire hazards, they make electric versions of the pot or just use fondue pots instead. To me, that's just not the same...

A Visit :)

2009-12-26T14:42:00.001-05:00

On Christmas Eve, I had dinner with NeuronDoc, her husband TheHusband, and their daughter ThePinkThing. They were passing through on their way to Florida. As was required by Jewish Christmas traditions, we went to a Chinese buffet. Here's me and NeuronDoc after the meal in the restaurant foyer:

(photo of me was improved upon with some help from Random Michelle. NeuronDoc has her own photo from the event, showing what I look like without being improved upon in any way. >.>)

The food turned out not to have as much variety of Chinese as I had hoped. Usually they do better than that. Otherwise, though, we had an excellent evening and didn't try to strangle each other at all. :)

Arrrrrrr. -.-

2009-12-22T00:55:00.003-05:00

It has been brought to my attention that spammers have recently found a way to post comment spam on Blogger blogs without it notifying me via email. How they're doing it, I have no idea. I just cleaned off a bunch of them from General Comments and Smileys, which they seem to like for some reason. If you see more anywhere, please tell me.

To cut down on this nonsense, I've turned on captchas (which I typically hate with a passion), and all comments on posts over 30 days old now go into moderation. Hopefully that'll help. And hopefully I'll be able to turn off the captchas again at some future date.

Which came first? The sachima or the rice krispie treat?

2009-12-21T22:42:00.002-05:00

A sachima is sort of like a rice krispie treat, except not with rice krispies, and not held together by marshmallows. Instead, they're sort of a flour-based poofy noodle, held together by melted sugar - though I'm quite certain I've had some made with honey. They also often include sesame seeds, raisins, nuts, and other stuff. The best ones are very moist and sticky, and freshly made in the bakeries of Taipei.

(I miss the bakeries in Taipei.)

These ones are freshly imported from Taipei to New York City, where John the Scientist bought them (thanks, John! :) ).

Aside from sachimas, I also grew up eating rice krispie treats that also didn't include rice krispies. My mother would make them with other breakfast cereals (captain crunch treats! corn pop treats!) and crispy noodles (like from La Choy; got served to the restaurant customers with the soups). Some of them were pretty good. Others, well, one could file them under "interesting." ;)

As for the title question: I have no idea. Wikipedia didn't say, and everyone else just copied from Wikipedia. T.T But I did find a blog of a western family living in Shanghai that I thought was pretty cool.

Gas Prices

2009-12-18T20:16:00.005-05:00

I bought gas a few days ago for $2.499 per gallon, which was down from the $2.569 it'd been for quite some time.

The time before that was back in mid-October, for $2.379 per gallon, which was right before it went up to $2.569 and stayed there.

There are certain advantages to not driving more than once or twice a week. :)

Bloons! T.T

2009-12-13T19:43:00.001-05:00

(or, alternate title: Where I've Been All Month)

Bloons Tower Defense 4 is the fourth in a series of tower defense games that I've been playing since the first one (Bloons Tower Defense, later followed by 2 and 3). In it, you pop balloons as they go around on a track, and try to get them all before they reach the other end. It's a cute game, and the bloon popping sound is a lot like for popping bubble wrap, which makes it very addictive. Here's some screenshots of the game in action:

So, basically, I wasted my entire first week of the month on this game. >.> Over the weekend, it occurred to me I could try to recoup some lost time by writing down everything I'd figured out in a series of strategy guides. Thus: Bloons Tower Defense 4 Strategy Guides for Map 1, Map 2, Map 3, and Map 4. :D They're long, detailed, and full of progress screenshots. I'll probably do one for Map 5 too, just as soon as I figure out how to beat it on level hard. Map 6, though, that looks terrifying.

While I was working on them, I clicked over to someone else's article about Bloons Tower Defense 2 - and noticed that it was terrible. Vague useless tips, some of which were completely wrong. o.O Clearly I'll have to write strategy guides for the other three games too, maybe when I've recovered from doing them for 4. I'm a bit sick of bloons at the moment. (Update: here's one for Bloons Tower Defense 1. :D )

Also while I was working on them, someone requested that I write a strategy guide for sudoku. So I did that too. :)

And that's been the first half of my month, which has gone entirely not the way I was originally planning... >.>

Other End of Nanowrimo 2009

2009-11-30T23:36:00.001-05:00

Final word count of 51415 for Nanowrimo 2009. :)

Lawn Shrooms

2009-11-21T17:12:00.000-05:00

At some point last spring, one of the trees disappeared. I don't even remember seeing a stump - it was just gone, with nothing but a patch of mulch where it once stood.

A few weeks ago, after heavy rains, the whole place started blooming in mushrooms. Lots and lots of them in big clumps. Here's one of the smaller clumps:

The biggest clump was about four times that size. No clue what kind they are, though they smell like portabellas. I guess the tree's symbiotic fungi are trying to find another tree.

Sidenote: my camera still takes macro shots because I remember what sequence of buttons to hit to get there, but I have no control over where it autofocuses. Thus the ..uhh, softening.. if you embiggen.

Some thoughts about electric cars

2009-11-09T16:25:00.000-05:00

The main thing that keeps me from considering an electric car as my next car: lack of feasibility for long distance road trips. They cannot presently go for up to 15 hours without stopping. I can see three possible ways to fix that:

a) Make a car battery that can last 15 hours without stopping. :p I assume this is unlikely, considering that laptop batteries only last for 2...

b) Make a car battery that can be charged back to full within 10-15 minutes. Most of the blurbs I've seen talk about 2-3 hours. I'm not going to pull into a battery station and sit there for 2-3 hours while it charges, when I can pull into a gas station and be gone again in 5-10 minutes.

c) Make it so that the car batteries are interchangeable and can be easily replaced. I pull into the battery station, remove my depleted battery, trade it for a fully charged battery, and get back on the road. This doesn't have to be free (I'd assume some sort of nominal charge if there's a station attendant that does this), but it also shouldn't mean actually purchasing a new battery at full price each time. It probably would require all the car manufacturers to agree on a standard battery design. Ideally, it should be simple enough that I can change it myself without being professionally certified in the procedure.

How about hybrid cars then? If the gas charges the battery, then the battery can last 15 hours, and then the only difference would be fewer stops for gas. I could do that.

Story of my love life

2009-11-05T02:51:00.003-05:00

Chapter One

Boy meets girl.
Boy wants to impress girl.
Boy does some sort of astounding feat.
Girl gushes over boy, impressed.
Hooray! :)

Chapter Two

Boy meets boy.
Boy wants to show up boy.
Boy does some sort of astounding feat.
Other boy? Does the same thing, only better!
Boy and boy probably go off to have a beer together.

Chapter Three

Boy meets me.
Boy wants to impress me.
Boy does some sort of astounding feat.
I? If I'm attracted, I want to impress him.
I do the same thing, only better!
Boy slinks off feeling like a loser, never to be seen again.

And thus: I stay away from love lives. :p

Nanowrimo 2009

2009-11-01T05:19:00.005-05:00

Like I've done every November since 2004, I'm writing 50,000+ words toward a novel in the next 30 days. By tradition, it's something from my Fortress Launne series, which originally had six books in it, but they've shifted around a lot in the intervening years and are still six books, but not the six I'd originally envisioned. :)

Anyway, it didn't take long before I got distracted by the Nanowrimo forums. One of their threads is pictures of writing areas. Well, here's mine:

Messy, huh? It's the normal state of my living room, alas. The computer was originally on the gray desk at the left, but it's too tall for my current chairs - a blue exercise ball and a one-seater couch. I had others, but freecycled them a few months ago. (The couch will be too when it's time to move.) My mouse is on a clipboard over the trashcan, which I move back and forth depending on which hand I feel like using to mouse at the time. The white keyboard is wireless, but the mouse isn't - hence the length of wire to make it reach the couch when I'm not on the ball. The black "keyboard" under the table is my Alphasmart Dana - it's actually a better keyboard than the Apple.

For those who want to follow along to my writing angst trials and tribulations, I have a writing blog freshly ported over from Hobgoblin.net, which is sadly defunct at the moment. I'll be posting a lot over there this month. :)

On a completely unrelated note: yes, that was taken by my broken camera. It still takes pictures just fine, so long as I don't want to change any of its settings or compose or something else that requires the screen to be working...

On another note: I'm looking forward to finding out what my European readers will decide to be intrigued by in this picture. ;)

Freelance Science

2009-10-15T18:10:00.006-04:00

Now that I have three whole articles up at Bright Hub, I thought I'd mention it here. :) Bright Hub is basically a collection of science and technology articles. The pay is potentially better than eHow (we'll see if that's true in a few months), and they have actual quality control in the form of editors who approve article ideas before they're written, and then approve the articles again before they're published. (eHow's idea of quality control is to delete stuff after they've been published, without telling anyone, and without sending back the stuff they've deleted. -.- Though they're slowly getting better about informing people.)

So far I'm enjoying writing for them. Compared to eHow, the possible topics I can write about are more in line with what I can actually write about, and the format is more flexible. I have lots of ideas for future articles, mostly about ecology and evolution and marine science, but I'm hoping to have a variety to show off as samples for more lucrative writing work later on.

Thanks to fellow UCFer Jeri for pointing me to the place. :)

Some of my favorite German metal

2009-09-24T03:46:00.002-04:00

Before I discovered Pandora, I listened to a lot of Internet radio broadcasting from other countries. I was mainly interested in music in languages other than English. My favorite was a metal/alternative station in Germany, which introduced me to all sorts of great songs and bands popular in Europe, but then they started broadcasting ads not just between songs, but in the middle of them. o.O After that, I moved to a Dutch station, but their music just wasn't the same and some of the announcers were annoying (yes, even in Dutch). I found Pandora and, although they didn't have very many of the songs from that German station, they also didn't have ads, and thus I was going to live happily ever after.

I'd still be at Pandora if it weren't for their new 40-hr per month cap. I run out of that after the first two weeks. T.T I'll happily give them money to let me listen to more (only $0.99 per month for unlimited) just as soon as they accept PayPal, but in the meantime, now I'm on Youtube.

It's nowhere near ideal. I have to go back every five minutes to hit "replay" and find new songs all by myself instead of having it all stream past me. However, I've been looking up songs I used to like. Some of it is finally making it onto Youtube. Such as:

And, as I wander, I find more good stuff that I hadn't heard before. For example, my new favorite:

5. Marz by Megaherz and Ohne Dich by Eisbrecher have the same singer. Megaherz is so named because they wanted to make "metal with heart." These two songs succeed well, I think. Both are actually love songs in disguise, though angsty rather than sappy. Yay emo metal. :D

Then, for something completely different, there's also Gottmensch by Schock:

and Vollmond by In Extremo:

and Walpurgisnacht by Schandmaul:

which isn't technically metal, but it comes to mind whenever my friends in Europe talk about Walpurgis Night, which is a major holiday over there.

And finally, because I can't very well post about German metal without mentioning Rammstein:

Dalai Lama is one of the few songs that doesn't have extremely disturbing lyrics. Rammstein is totally awesome so long as you don't go looking for translations to anything. o.O

My favorite comic strip

2009-09-21T01:30:00.002-04:00

I discovered Foxtrot by Bill Amend while I was in grad school. I now own all eleven of the treasury collections. Here's one of my all-time favorites, which came out while Star Wars was also out:

(copied out of Assorted Foxtrot, click to embiggen)

I laughed and laughed at that one, then tacked it to my office wall so I could laugh some more. I still laugh at it. Nothing like three punchlines in one. :)

Sadly, the daily strip is no more (though there are still weekly Sundays). Which is probably just as well - better to end while things are still funny, than to start recycling the same jokes over and over for decades. Here's my favorite strip from the very last treasury, which came out in May:

(copied out of Wrapped-Up Foxtrot, click to embiggen)

More of these are available for browsing at GoComics.

Injustice

2009-09-17T21:45:00.003-04:00

Cop: "Do you know why I'm stopping you?"

Me (what I actually said): "Umm ... ahh ... urk."

Me (what I should have said, now that I've had several days to think it up): "Yeah, because it's a smalltown speed trap, and I'm a non-local who didn't realize that the speed limit would suddenly drop from 45 to 20 for two blocks in the middle of a highway. And because I didn't do the obvious, logically safe thing of slamming on my brakes in the middle of a highway, I shall now be forced to give you lots of money. It might possibly cause some financial ruin, but hey, you just want my money and I'm a non-local so who cares."

Cop (after handing me the ticket): "Now, try to slow down."

Me (what I actually said, just before I went back to driving exactly the way I was driving before (because the 20 mph zone was over)): "Yeah, sure."

Me (what I wanted to say): "Up yours."

-.-

Health Care Thoughts

2009-09-10T05:13:00.001-04:00

TO:
Rep. John Barrow
Sen. Saxby Chambliss
Sen. Johnny Isakson

Please support President Obama's plan for health reform in 2009. We need to bring stability and security to those who currently have insurance, affordable coverage to those who don't, and rein in the cost of health care.

We are not the first generation to tackle the cause of health reform, but we must be the last.

We need this. It's an excellent, well-thought-out plan. Please don't destroy it.

Sincerely,
MWT

I signed the above shortly after the speech. Most of it is pre-written but there's room for individual comments on the form. It automatically pulls up your particular representatives when you fill in your street and zip code. I think people who live in red states especially should sign it.

On the whole, I like the proposed plan. It won't be as nice as what other countries have - but it accounts for all the ideas and concerns from all sides, it's realistic and therefore has a chance of actually passing, and it's an important first step in the right direction. Here's a flowchart that summarizes it pretty well (click for larger version):

My favorite part (from the speech) was:

Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition. As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime.

These are exactly the sorts of things I worry about most. Back when I had health care, I wondered what would happen if I passed my lifetime cap - would I just be expected to drop dead at that point? (Apparently the answer is yes.) And now that I don't have health care, the pre-existing condition clause is a bit worrying, if I were to develop something before finding a job where I had health care again. (And, I might add, until the speech I hadn't known that people got denied health care for pre-existing conditions they didn't even know they had. o.O)

Part I liked least:

... individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance - just as most states require you to carry auto insurance.

I understand the reasoning behind it. But the exemption bar had better be high. Better would be to just put all the people below the exemption bar on a public option for free, though that raises some questions on how it would affect the whole self-sufficiency thing.

In general, I think the speech has brought the health care reform conversation back on topic and moved it forward another step. Hopefully good things will happen from here.

Through the eyes of small children

2009-09-08T21:32:00.003-04:00

Yes, Kenza. I really am a boy on the inside. Thank you for noticing. You have no idea how much it pleases me that you can see what all the grownups cannot.

I think that the next time a six year old asks me that, if it happens again, I'm not going to evade with an answer about wanting to talk to her mother about it first. I'm just going to say yes.

My Past Two Months As Described By Twitter Posts (abridged)

2009-09-03T04:03:00.000-04:00

Assuming anyone is even still looking, posting here has been rather light and fluffy for a while, possibly even verging on nonexistent. >.>

I've been busy. I got official notice of being laid off in late June (with warning hints back in April), my last day was Monday, and in between I've been wrapping up work at work, job hunting at home, trying to put together a demo website of my leet skillz, and taking care of an enormous number of details involved in preparing for a move (because, if I actually found a job, I'd need to move to it). I still haven't gotten to the packing part of the proceedings yet, but I'm down to only five boxes left in my storage room. Once those are sorted, packing will commence. I'm also shedding all sorts of unused-but-still-useful items to Goodwill and Freecycle, and trying to eat everything in the pantry.

Instead of writing longwinded posts here, I've been putting short updates over on Twitter instead. For those not on Twitter, here's an abridged version:

Today I did almost nothing of note. Tomorrow I dive back into the chaos. If there's another lull somewhere, maybe I'll post again this month...

A Portrait

2009-08-15T04:52:00.003-04:00

Some artwork I did back in 4th grade, when I drew a lot and was also fascinated by the Plains Indians:

I forgot about it for a good long while, until I stumbled across a photo on the Internet:

The feather gives it away, I think. :)

Then, while sorting through lots and lots of old personal papers this past year, I came across my drawing again. In retrospect, looking at this and other drawings, I'm really not as good of an artist as I thought I was, and as everyone said I was. But I'm not too bad, either. Maybe I'll start drawing again someday.

Tomatoes, about five weeks later

2009-07-28T14:34:00.002-04:00

My tomatoes are doing well. Here they are, happily in their final pots:

And here are some future tomatoes (hopefully):

I haven't decided where they're going when I move, but they probably won't be able to come with me. But that's okay, I have more seeds for later. :)

We Can Haz Health Care Now?

2009-07-17T18:37:00.001-04:00

A hypothetical scenario: Joe Blow is informed that he is being laid off. Shortly after, he discovers an unusual lump in his leg. What happens next?

Well, if Joe Blow lived in any first world country other than the U.S., he would go to a doctor, get it diagnosed, undergo any necessary medical treatment, and otherwise get it taken care of. Then he would find a new job and go back to being a happy, productive taxpayer. The End.

In the U.S.?

Being laid off means that health insurance is about to end. Sure, health plans can be extended through something called "Cobra" - but in practice that means adding a sizeable new bill during a time of zero income, which is not a financially sound thing to do.

Being diagnosed with something serious while without health insurance means that all health care costs must come out of pocket. This is even less sound financially during a period of zero income. Especially if Joe Blow only has enough savings to afford being laid off OR have a medical issue, but not both at the same time.

Being diagnosed with something serious before acquiring new health insurance means that "pre-existing condition" clauses might kick in, thereby causing the new health insurance to cost more.

Thus, financially speaking, Joe Blow should delay going to the doctor until after he has acquired a new job with new health insurance. Then he can discover he has now-incurable terminal cancer, and die.

Because the other choice would be to go to the doctor "now," discover he has cancer, undergo treatment, and enter financial ruin. Then he'll become homeless, possibly no longer be able to afford the rest of treatment, and die.

Ahh, the U.S. of A. Very nice first world country - if you're rich. Third world country if you're not. Alas for Joe Blow.

(Note: the above is all entirely hypothetical, of course. Entirely.)

News from the Sprouts Farm

2009-07-14T03:49:00.001-04:00

At first I was going to make crop circles and other patterns, such as:

It turns out, though, that other people are much better than I am for coming up with patterns to make (*cough* Anne *cough*), so now I'm going the route of Nerd King instead. Here's my first Farm Town Sudoku:

I got the pattern by playing a round of Jigsawdoku, then writing down the numbers at the end. I then assigned nine different crops to the numbers (carrots, peas, tomatoes, rice, wheat, watermelon, potatoes, strawberries, cabbage) and planted accordingly. Voila. :D

In other news, it's high time I did a sequel to my pylon bunny. That one became my trademark on Battlenet and in RPoL's chat. Amongst the UCF, however, I now have: o.O In online chat situations this is a commonly used ascii facial expression, but most UCFers hadn't seen it before I came along, and it became associated with me. Just like the bunny did. Meanwhile, Farm Town seems to have become the official UCF pasttime (even if half the membership have not yet been sucked in). Thus:

:D

The World Is My Oyster

2009-07-07T11:58:00.003-04:00

On the one hand, I'm going to miss this place. I enjoyed being able to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, so long as 40 hours worth of work got done each week. I enjoyed the scenery to, from, and during work, the relaxed pace and lack of stress. I enjoyed everything about living here, as it gave me the time I needed to rest, regather, and redefine who I am. It's been a good eight years.

But on the other hand, it's time to move on. It has been time to move on for almost a year, in fact. What once was solace has slowly become limitations and fetters. What once didn't matter now does. I can't keep pets, I can't grow gardens, I can't do a lot of things involving money that I don't have, and I'm increasingly disgruntled with the way I'm treated at my workplace. It's no longer enough just to survive. I'm rested, and now I want to live.

And so, after I got over the initial shock of being canned due to a lack of grant funds, now that I am no longer bound by honor to finish the work I've started here, what I most feel is freedom.

Slice of Life (mine)

2009-07-03T01:29:00.005-04:00

A scene in a crummy little town in Kentucky, next to a semi wreck that has closed both sides of the interstate and forced everybody to go 15 miles on a dinky little state road...

I walk into the gas station.

The lady behind the counter finishes helping the customer in front of me, then starts sorting change.

I stand there and wait patiently for her to finish.

Eventually she runs out of stuff to fiddle with. Without looking at me, in a carefully guarded tone of voice that says "I'm being as polite as possible under such trying circumstances," she says "yes?"

I get as far as "how do I--" before she interrupts and tells me how to find the detour.

Halfway through, a man walks into the store and says something like "did you mean the red light out that way?" (Obviously he was looking for the same directions.)

The lady behind the counter drops talking to me entirely as she shifts her full attention to the other guy. The directions get clarified. I stand there and listen in. The man nods and leaves.

I say "thanks." The lady completely ignores me.

I follow the man through the door. He tries to close it on me. Then he goes back to his truck without looking back.

I usually don't bother getting offended by stuff like this, because it happens so often that it's 'normal'. But in the spirit of describing what I see that other people don't, I thought I'd share.

Clan [Wolf] Reunion

2009-06-30T23:28:00.003-04:00

Clan [Wolf] was an awesome bunch of Starcraft and Diablo 2 players that I knew back at the beginning of the century. We're having a reunion. I'm collecting snarky comments. Take it away, guys. ;)

But I don't know how to leave you

2009-06-30T02:47:00.002-04:00

And so the knight in shining armor, who spent the last six years never having time to be with the princess that he worked so hard trying to keep, failed. And the shared dream came to an end, even though it was never like that at all.

I don't know what I can say or do to make it better. I'm sorry too. And I still love you anyway.

I wish you could come with me.

Tomato Sprouts

2009-06-24T18:30:00.000-04:00

Last year's tomatoes were from a neighbor who had too many, all in one tiny pot. He ended up giving me about 30 of them that I planted in three big pots. They survived up until February or so, but only made a few small tomatoes, most of which stayed green.

This year I bought a packet of seeds, rehydrated some peat pellets I had lying around, and sprouted six of them myself. Here they are, after a couple weeks in a cheap plastic incubator (clear dome cover not pictured):

I potted them last weekend. So far they're still strictly indoor plants until they get big enough to survive being dug up by roving area mammals. Then they'll get moved to my big pots from last year. I might try to find some high shelving to put them on, and let the vines grow downward instead of staking them upward. I've heard that works better.

I also have an unused 3-foot sill planter thing. I'm thinking to try putting strawberries in them. But that might have to wait until next year.

Why no, it ISN'T supposed to be normal for this to happen

2009-06-22T13:46:00.006-04:00

To the lovely young (white) couple standing in line ahead of me, who recognized and began a lengthy, enthusiastic conversation with the lovely young (white) couple standing in line behind me:

The polite thing to do would've been to offer to let me move ahead of you in line, instead of talking through me like I don't exist.

Signed,
The totally dismissible Asian person standing directly in the middle of your happy little group

p.s. The whole, shake hands around me thing, that was a bit over the top, even for normal non-acknowledgement of my existence.

-.-

Happy Father's Day

2009-06-21T18:24:00.004-04:00

I said profound stuff about my father last year. This year, in the face of sudden major life upheavals (more on that in a future post when I can say something organized), this is all I have to offer:

Edy's uses corn syrup as an ingredient in their ice cream! o.O Never again will I stray from my stand-by of all-natural Breyer's.

(Which is an ironic profundity (or profound irony) in itself, about finding something you like and sticking with it from then on.)

Now, back to my bowl of butter pecan...

A Week in the Life of a Desk Jockey Oceanography Tech

2009-06-13T05:36:00.000-04:00

A2009129180500_Composited_map.hdf

A2009130184500L2_map.hdf

These images show an estimate of chlorophyll levels off the coast of the southeastern U.S., on a log scale from 0.1 to 10, at a resolution of 1 km per pixel. Yellow is high, blue is low. About half of my job description involves making and sorting satellite images like these. I have several thousand of them, dating as far back as late 1997, showing all sorts of things about the ocean just off the coast (another example: sea-surface temperature (SST)). (And just to be clear, these images aren't coming off of military spy satellites or anything impressive like that, they're not classified, most of the data is freely available off the Internet. Nobody dangerous cares about this kind of scientific data. :) )

Then one day my boss said: "Can you get an estimate of cloud cover?"

And I thought: cloud cover. All I have to do is count up all the pixels representing the clouds, divide by the total number of pixels, and voila - percent cloud cover! Should be simple!

Yeah.

1. Grabbing the pixels to be counted

The first thing I did was to draw a line around the area I wanted to count. In this case, I figured he wanted basically the entire South Atlantic Bight (from Cape Canaveral to Cape Hatteras (aside: the name is a bit misleading, since the area isn't actually in the southern Atlantic Ocean, it just happens to be south of the Mid-Atlantic Bight (Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod). Ahh, Northeastern USian centrism.)) - from the shoreline to the edge of the continental shelf.

Getting the offshore side was easy enough, since I had a dotted yellow contour line for 500m depth already, and I could just follow that. Land, however, was a bit trickier, since I wasn't about to try following the shoreline pixel-by-pixel by hand. And inconveniently, the (usually large) negative number representing clouds is the same as the negative number representing land, which means there's no way to separate the two.

On the other hand, the most recent versions of seadas like to guess wildly at what sea surface temperature might be under the clouds. This is officially called "interpolation" - but what actually happens is a mess of processing artifacts that look like oddly shaped cold spots in strange places. (There's a few in my above SST example, lower right of the image; I picked that particular image at the time for its lack of the artifacts, though.) Most of the time it's annoying, as we like nice, solid black clouds that look like obvious clouds, like in the second chlorophyll image up top. But for land vs. cloud separation purposes, having clouds pretending to be strangely cold patches of the sea worked in my favor.

I picked a reasonably clear SST image, overlapped my line onto land, let seadas fill the whole thing in, and ended up with a blotch of 141,290 coordinate points like so:

(as plotted on a bathymetry image)

Then I fed it to Matlab and told it to strip out all points representing land:


fid = fopen('polishedblotch.dat','w');
for i = 1:length(sst)
   if sst(i) ~= -163.835
      fprintf(fid, '%6.3f  ',blotchtemplate(i, 1));
      fprintf(fid, '%6.3f  ',blotchtemplate(i, 2));
      fprintf(fid, '%6.3f\n',blotchtemplate(i, 3));
   end
end
fclose(fid);

... which gave me:

(blue = before, green = after)

2. Grabbing the actual data

Now that I had a blotch with all the coordinates I wanted to count, it was time to get some actual data. So I wrote some IDL:


fnames=FINDFILE('/75-char-filepath/*hdf')
cnt = N_ELEMENTS(fnames)

for ctr = 0, cnt-1 do begin & $
   load, fnames(ctr), ftype = 'MAPPED', prod_name = ['Mapped - chlor_a', 'Mapped - chla'] & $
   out_track, iband=1, ifile = 'polishedblotch.dat', ofile = STRMID(fnames(ctr), 75, 8) + 'blotch_chl.txt', /no_connect & $
   clear_up & $
endfor

It takes in files with names like A2009130184500L2_map.hdf, and puts out files with names like A2009130blotch_chl.txt. Notice that I'm going for chlorophyll here instead of SST. This is because chlorophyll has real clouds. Also, out of all the possible things I could use, chlorophyll is one of the most basic measures, how it's measured and processed by seadas has changed the least in the past decade, and therefore it's the most consistent and extensive collection I have. (Also note: out_track is a seadas-specific function, not a general IDL function.)

Unfortunately, it turns out that IDL doesn't like looping through anything more than 32,000 times. And my blotch of coordinates contains 125,557 points (that's 125,557 square kilometers in the SAB). I saw suggestions to use "for ctr = 0L" instead of "for ctr = 0", and "fnames[ctr]" instead of "fnames(ctr)", but in the end, I used Matlab to break up the file into four parts:


blotch1 = polishedblotch(1:32000,:);
blotch2 = polishedblotch(32001:64000,:);
blotch3 = polishedblotch(64001:96000,:);
blotch4 = polishedblotch(96001:end,:);

fid2 = fopen('polishedblotch4.dat','w');
for i=1:length(blotch4)
   fprintf(fid2, '%6.3f  ',blotch4(i,1));
   fprintf(fid2, '%6.3f  ',blotch4(i,2));
   fprintf(fid2, '%6.3f\n',blotch4(i,3));
end
fclose(fid2);

and added some more lines to the IDL script:


   out_track, iband=1, ifile = 'polishedblotch2.dat', ofile = STRMID(fnames(ctr), 75, 8) + 'blotch_chl.txt', /no_connect, /append & $
   out_track, iband=1, ifile = 'polishedblotch3.dat', ofile = STRMID(fnames(ctr), 75, 8) + 'blotch_chl.txt', /no_connect, /append & $
   out_track, iband=1, ifile = 'polishedblotch4.dat', ofile = STRMID(fnames(ctr), 75, 8) + 'blotch_chl.txt', /no_connect, /append & $

... which amounted to the same thing.

3. Putting the data into the database

Now I had a bunch of coordinate points, and I had used it to extract some data. It was time to put all this into my PostgreSQL database!

Why would I want to do that, you ask? Why not just open it in Matlab again and do some simple division? Well, that would work great if all I had to do was a few images, this was the only time I'd have to do it, and then I'd never hear about this particular task again. However, if I'll eventually end up having to do several thousand of them spread throughout the decade, the excessive paperwork would eventually kill me.

It had also occurred to me that, as long as I'm extracting all this data to calculate percent cloud cover, why not save it somewhere easily accessible where I can use the data as actual data, too?

So I made a couple new tables. Blotchcoords would hold all the coordinate points, and then blotchdata would refer to it (plus several other tables I already had) and contain the actual data. And I wrote some PHP to get it all in. Most of it was to turn seadas's bizarre output format into something that the database could understand. First, to fill blotchcoords:


$counter = 0;
$success = 0;
while($datablock = fgets($file_handle)){
$counter++;
if (substr($datablock, 7, 5) == '(  1)') {
$lat = substr($datablock, 32, 6);
$lon = substr($datablock, 42, 7);
$value = substr($datablock, -21, 8);
$query = "insert into blotchcoords (coords_id, latitude, longitude, depth) values (nextval('blotchcoords_coords_id_seq'), $lat, $lon, $value)";
if (pg_query($dbconn, $query))  {$success++;}
} #endif
} #endwhile
echo "$counter lines processed, $success lines entered, for $file.\n\n";

It turns out that 125,557 database inserts takes a few hours. While I was waiting, I wrote the additions to put the actual data in; it's basically the same, except that the script first has to find the right reference in the coordinate table before doing the database insert.


$findcoord = "select coords_id from blotchcoords where latitude = $lat and longitude = $lon";
$out1=pg_query($dbconn, $findcoord);
$coords = pg_fetch_object($out1,0);
$query = "insert into blotchdata (blotch_id, value, date_id, prod_id, sat_id, coords_id) values (nextval('blotchdata_blotch_id_seq'), $value, $date->date_id, $prod, $sat, $coords->coords_id)";

It turns out that 125,557 reference lookups in addition to database inserts takes 12 hours. o.O I've since written up a shortcut; instead of looking up the references, now it just assumes that the coordinates are in the same order as the data, and counts up accordingly. Which is generally bad practice - never assume anything, ever - but in my case the coordinates data all went in in one go without stopping, so I'm pretty safe.

4. Calculate percent cloud cover

And finally, I could do the actual calculation! Here it is in SQL:

select ((select count(*)::numeric from blotchdata where value = -1 and date_id = 2314)/(select count(*)::numeric from blotchdata where date_id = 2314))*100 AS percentcloudcover;

(In the case of chlorophyll, clouds are -1.)

It turns out that for May 9, 2009 (top left), cloud cover was 5%, and for May 10, 2009 (top right) it was 35%.

:D

THE END

In the end, I've managed to use bits of every coding language I know at some point during the past week - and was comfy moving back and forth between them. And knew how to do the whole thing without asking for help from anyone (except for a bit at the end there to tweak the SQL). For someone who has no formal training in any of this stuff, and who was completely clueless six years ago, I think I'm doing pretty good. :)

Mies Del Dolor

2009-06-06T15:47:00.005-04:00

Blind Guardian is a ~~Swedish~~ German metal band that gets regularly recommended to me, based on what else I like (Rammstein, Megaherz/Eisbrecher, Nightwish, symphonic metal in general). Most of their songs make no impression on me whatsoever - it's pleasant enough background music in my Pandora seed rotation, but doesn't draw my attention enough to find out what it is or who's playing it.

Except for Mies Del Dolor. It's in Spanish, unlike most of their songs which are in English, and it sounds nothing like most songs in Spanish I'm exposed to. This is more like a ballad.

So far as I know, there isn't a readily available English translation of the lyrics. I have no idea what they're singing. Which is not unlike the current state of my thoughts on romance in general, which might be part of why I like it so much. :)

UPDATE: Figures. There's a version of this in English, under a different name!

I think I still like it better in Spanish though.

Contradiction of the Day

2009-06-05T02:20:00.000-04:00

I think I'm only capable of unconditional love if I'm not in a romantic relationship.

Individual people are cool. I enjoy following their lives, especially if theirs are vastly different from mine - if they've seen or done things I haven't, or were born into perspectives not like mine and not within the USian dominant cultures. I enjoy finding out what they think, why they think that way, how they got there. I can admire their strengths, find beauty in their weaknesses, and love their diversity of humanity. I like people who are being who they are.

By the same token, one of the biggest things I look for in others is an ability to see and understand and like me for who I am, as I am, for my own sake and not for who I am in relation to them. People who can recognize the subtle signs to stop talking about themselves and start listening, because I have something important to say. Those are the people who end up becoming my closest friends.

But when it comes to seeing someone as a potential lifelong mate, it's not just about them anymore - it becomes much more about how they relate to me. Do I personally like them, what they think, and how they think? Do I find them physically attractive? What do I think of their pursuits in life? Do I find their interests or any aspects of their personalities annoying? Can they continue to be who they are, or would they have to change in ways that would make them less happy but would please me more, and how can I ask them for changes like that? Can I somehow avoid becoming ridiculously jealous over extremely stupid things, and wanting to control how they think, as past experiences have shown I do?

On the whole, I think I'm waiting to find someone who is already exactly who I want them to be.

Note: the immediate cause of these thoughts is not the only source of them.

Domino's Breadbowls: A Review

2009-05-31T18:45:00.004-04:00

The new Domino's pasta primavera breadbowl has a description of: "Offers fresh spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms and onions mixed with penne pasta and baked to perfection with creamy Alfredo sauce. $7.99"

On the whole, I prefer Pizza Hut's pizza over Domino's, at least when we're talking about pizza places within walking distance of my home, but thought I'd give the breadbowls a try. I wasn't expecting much with the actual bread, since that would be the same as what they use for their pizza crusts, but figured the pasta might be good. So I ordered one.

Half an hour later, I'm not at all impressed.

It did have mushrooms, spinach and onions in it - but the latter two were barely cooked. That was okay for the spinach, not so much for the onions. There wasn't very much spinach or onions in the thing, maybe about five little pieces of each. There were no tomatoes at all. There was, however, a whole lot of bacon (and, oddly, a piece of green olive). At first I was okay with that, since I'd pondered getting them to add sausage, but decided against spending extra money until I found out how good the rest of it was. However, there was so much of it that (combined with the oversalted cheese sauce) the whole thing was way too salty.

As for the bread. As I said, I wasn't expecting very much. However, I was expecting it to be all the way cooked. This one is distinctly doughy on the inside, and as far as I can tell it never did rise up to surround the pasta with tasty oven-baked goodness like the box says it would. That, added in with the near-raw onions and barely steamed spinach, makes me think they need to work out their cooking method for these things a bit more.

Then there's portion size. It's ridiculously small for the price I paid. For $7.99 at a sitdown Italian restaurant serving real pasta, I'd get two to three times as much food. This breadbowl had maybe five total bites of pasta in it, total.

So, in conclusion: $7.99 (plus tax) down the drain and I'm still hungry, and now must drink lots of water. And I guess I'll stick the empty breadbowl in my toaster oven and see if I can get it all the way cooked.

Dare I try one of their new oven-baked sandwiches? The bread looks like it's something different from their pizza crust bread, at least. Maybe some other time...

Metaphysical musings

2009-05-28T02:55:00.004-04:00

Vitalism is the belief that all living things contain a spirit. Animism is the belief that all things, living or otherwise, do.^* A friend recently asked me, which am I? And how do I reconcile that with being an evolutionary biologist?

My answer: Biology is about the physical forms of life, and evolution is about how they got to be the way they are. For that matter, all of the hard sciences are about the physical world. Animism and vitalism are about spirits, which are not physical. What does the one have to do with the other? To me, not a whole lot. Physical form probably influences how a spirit perceives and interacts with the world, but in the end body and soul are separate things.

So what do I think about spirits in general? Well, all living things certainly have them. Not sure about non-living things. There are also spirits that aren't attached to physical forms. Some of them survived their deaths in the physical world; others, I have no idea whether they came from a somewhere or if their there is where they've always been. But the physical plane is not the only one.

I'm not sure whether my friend was satisfied with that answer or not.

^*Apparently it's more longwinded than that, with whole philosophical schools of thought behind those concepts, with which I'm completely unfamiliar, so I'll just go with how it was defined to me, as above by said friend.

Sprouts: Behind the Name

2009-05-26T01:15:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time in Facebook Land, there was an Ultimate Hitman game - where you go around to different places around the world, assassinating people. A friend wanted me to sign up so that he would have an extra cell member, and therefore be able to take on bigger and better missions. To get in, I had to pick a home country and a name. Since I wasn't planning to play, I searched the list for the most loserlike country I could find - which I eventually decided was Belgium. It's certainly not the first country that comes to mind when one thinks of mercenary assassins. Then came name. Obviously, it should have something to do with Belgium. Well, Belgium's capital is Brussels ... and thusly did I become Spooky Sprouts.

Then, a while later, there came another game, Mafia Wars - which I did plan to play. Well, I had a hitman name already, so obviously that should also be my mafia name. And thus Don Sprouts was born. Unfortunately, Mafia Land is a cruel, cruel world, and poor Sprouts got pounded into a pulp a lot. Something about the name that just says "please beat me" I suppose. So when Vampire Wars came along shortly thereafter, it only made sense to name my vampire Undead Sprouts. Don Sprouts dies, Undead Sprouts rises.

By that point it was a trend. In Pirates of the Caribbean I was Captain Sprouts (with pet parrot Lady Carrots!), and in Dragon Wars I was an elf named Sprout. And when Farm Town caught everyone's eye, there finally was a place where the name made sense. Yay Farmer Sprouts, who "retired" from all those wars and bought a farm. :)

Now I've embarked on a whole new career of making crop circles with my virtual crops. Here's the first one I made:

It's supposed to be a swirl, not a swastika, but an 8x8 grid turns out to be a bit small. Eventually I'll have more land, and will make larger, more complicated patterns. Maybe I'll post them here from time to time. ;)

Why I'm not smart enough to be a restauranteur

2009-05-24T16:28:00.000-04:00

Food stamps can only be used to buy ingredients and raw food, not cooked food, and therefore can't be used in restaurants.

Some people with food stamps may not be able to cook food - e.g. broken stove, no stove, lack of electricity or gas to stove.

Seafood markets are primarily sellers of raw food. They therefore take food stamps.

Many seafood markets in the U.S. southeast will also prepare and cook food upon request. Officially this is a side service.

Some friends of mine (formerly the owners of a Chinese takeout) own and run a seafood market. It's located in a poor part of town. They will fry, steam, or boil nearly everything they sell (for a small fee).

The end result:

There is no actual difference between their seafood market and their Chinese takeout from an order-taking/food-passing perspective, except that nobody ever writes any of the orders down. T.T

There is a big difference at the cash register. Because food stamps can't be used for cooked food, the cooking fee must be charged separately as cash - which can get really complicated with the whole not writing anything down thing. But only to me, because everyone else there can do it in their heads. TT.TT

Trying, trying once again

2009-05-22T05:12:00.006-04:00

When it comes to questions of nature versus nurture on the topic of gender differences, transpeople have a perspective that cispeople do not have. We may not be able to articulate what those differences are in a way that doesn't cause cispeople to immediately jump to conclusions about stereotyping, but for us the topic is not an intellectual exercise or a set of abstract theories about the workings of society and culture. We see the differences firsthand, as a part of everyday life.

Again With The Chives

2009-05-15T04:37:00.002-04:00

My chives haven't changed much since January. Here they are, looking a bit greener as they get ready for another summer. I'm not doing a whole lot - just watering occasionally. I could really use some good summer recipes that call for chives...

Meanwhile, I started a compost bin. It consists of a $5 plastic tub from Kmart, into which I've dumped a bunch of veggie scraps, the remains of last year's basil, and some of last year's tomato soil. Also, some leaves and debris from a 3-foot planter that was occupied by a bunch of tree saplings until just before I thought about taking a picture, whereupon they somehow disappeared. o.O Anyway, we'll see how this new adventure goes. If all that happens is I get into the habit of separating veggie scraps out from the rest of my kitchen garbage, that's already a step up from what I was doing before.

Summary of the Crank That We Debunked

2009-05-14T00:01:00.010-04:00

So... Walter L. Wagner, most recently known for filing suit in Hawaii to shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland (video summary by The Daily Show), who is currently under indictment for Attempted Theft In The First Degree and Identity Theft In The First Degree from World Botanical Gardens, Inc. in Umauma, Hawaii, has led a fascinating, litigation-rich life. His past decade, especially, seems to have been packed solid with at least half a dozen completely separate legal battles in at least four states - from suing of colliders to accumulating restraining orders to alleged embezzlement and fraud. Here's a timeline of his life as we know it, pieced together from public and (mostly) online sources.

1968: graduated from Salinas High School, Salinas, California
(self-reported at classmates.com)

1970: graduated from Hartnell College (a community college with its main campus in South Salinas), California
(self-reported at classmates.com)

1970: began attending UC-Berkeley
(from a 2003 interview in the East Bay Express, Emeryville, CA)

1970s: was involved in the No Nukes movement, and worked for antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott. Eventually he disagreed with her approach and left the movement.
(from a 2003 interview in the East Bay Express, Emeryville, CA)

1972: graduated from UC-Berkeley with a Biology BA
(self-reported at classmates.com, 2008 legal affidavit for the lawsuit against the LHC, a 29 Jul 1982 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine)

1973: was hired by Dr. P. Buford Price, physics professor at UC-Berkeley, as a scanner. Job description of a particle physics scanner: "A scanner is carefully instructed in what to look for through an optical microscope as he systematically moves the field of view, like a lawn mower. He records all tracks that fit the professor's or graduate student's criteria. When all events that fit the criteria are analyzed (and this may take a year or longer), the scientists write a paper, usually using mathematical techniques that are beyond the capability of the scanner. At the end of the paper the scanner(s) are thanked."
(date is from the 2008 legal affidavit for the lawsuit against the LHC)

July 1975: left the Price lab to start law school at the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento
(date self-reported from a comment on John the Scientist's blog; name of school from 26 Sep 1977 People Magazine article, Wagner v. Flippo 2005)

1975-1978: Price et al (1975) published a paper about the possible detection of a magnetic monopole, with Wagner as one of five people listed in the acknowledgements for "assistance." A 25 Aug 1975 Time Magazine article highlights Julie Teague as well as Walter Wagner as the technical assistants that first spotted the particle track. Alvarez (1975) disputed Price et al (1975) a month later with a conference presentation, and Price et al (1978) retracted their claim; Wagner had no role in these parts of the science.
(P. B. Price; E. K. Shirk; W. Z. Osborne; L. S. Pinsky (1975). "Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole". Physical Review Letters 35 (8): 487-490. American Physical Society.
Alvarez, L.W. (1975) "Analysis of a reported magnetic monopole."
Price, P. B.; Shirk, E. K.; Osborne, W. Z.; and Pinsky L. S. (1978). "Further measurements and reassessment of the magnetic-monopole candidate Phys. Rev. D 18, 1382-1421.)

1975: met Gail Morton, started following her around, sending her lots of gifts, making lots of phone calls, and other signs of affection - all unwanted by Ms. Morton
fall 1976: Morton won a court injunction (restraining order) against him
fall 1976-fall 1977: convicted of 17 counts of contempt
Sep 1977: sentencing occurred
1976-1977: Wagner dropped out of McGeorge to repeat his first year at Lincoln Law School in Sacramento.
(from a 26 Sep 1977 People Magazine article, name of law school self-reported at classmates.com. Additional reference: "The Ardent Suitor" by Jerrold K. Footlick, Newsweek, 4 Jul 1977, p.59)

1978: self-reported graduation date from three different law schools: McGeorge, Lincoln, and University of Northern California Lorenzo Patiño School of Law.
(self-reported at classmates.com)

Note: He is highly unlikely to have completed a law degree by 1978 if he repeated first year in 1976 or later, as People Magazine reports. What probably happened was that his actual degree came from Lorenzo Patiño sometime after it opened in 1983. Lorenzo Patiño is an unaccredited law school. Also, there is no evidence that he ever passed a bar exam in California or Hawaii.

1978: California Code Of Civil Procedure Section 527.6, titled: "Injunctions to prevent harassment; Possession of firearm by person subject to protective order" enacted as a result of Wagner's actions toward Morton from 1975-1977.
(references: Diamond View Limited v. Herz (1986) 180 Cal. App. 3d 612, 225 Cal. Rptr. 651; 2003 Cal. App. Unpub. LEXIS 6054)

1979: hired as the head radiation safety officer at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center
(from a 2003 interview in the East Bay Express, Emeryville, CA)

1981: 1977 injunction against approaching or contacting Gail Morton was dissolved by mutual release after a civil suit arising from an "injurious newspaper article." This dissolution was affirmed on 14 Jul 2004 by Judge Maldonado of the Monterey County Appellate Division of the Superior Court of California (see below for more details).
(Wagner v. Flippo 2005 - No. C 05-02863 JSW)

29 Jul 1982: Had a letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine about the dangers of radioactive tobacco.

1984: left the radiation safety officer job at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center
(from a 2003 interview in the East Bay Express, Emeryville, CA)

1984-2003: briefly taught earth science at Oakland's Arroyo Junior High. Presumably was a teacher at all of the other schools self-reported at classmates.com where he clearly wasn't a student. Presumably aced his much-beloved CBEST (a standardized test for grade school teachers) during this time as well. Also, founded the Monterey Bay Perpetual Endowment Foundation for Wellness.

4 Jul 1995: opening of the World Botanical Gardens, a botanical garden in Umauma, Hawaii. Apparently it was incorporated in Nevada.
(some history included here)

12 Jun 1996: apparently there is also a Utah chapter to the World Botanical Gardens, called World Botanical Garden Institute.
(Deseret News Publishing Co.)

1999: Radiation Man is born. The quest to eliminate uraniam-glazed tiles began in a Baja Cantina restaurant in Monterey, CA.
(from a 2003 interview in the East Bay Express, Emeryville, CA)

Jul 1999: had a letter to the editor published in Scientific American about black holes being created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Letter was refuted by Dr. Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

May 1999 - May 2000: filed lawsuits in San Francisco and New York versus the U.S. Dept. of Energy, then the Brookhaven Science Association, to shut down the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
(14 Jun 2000 article at msnbc.com)

10 Nov 2001: Was arrested near the San Francisco airport after repeated attempts to contact Gail Morton against her wishes. He was carrying several knives and a list of Morton's coworkers at the time.
(Wagner v. Flippo 2005 - No. C 05-02863 JSW)

20 Nov 2001: Prosecution began against him for violating the 1977 injunction.

2001: A new 3-year injunction was issued.
(California Public Court Record H028942)

2003: Appealed arguing that the 1977 injunction had been voided. Appeal denied.

2003: Radiation Man is going door to door in California, warning about the dangers of uranium-glazed tiles.
(article at msnbc.com, 2003 interview in the East Bay Express, Emeryville, CA)

30 May 2003: appeal denied in Hawaii regarding something about the Wagners' minor unmarried daughter and a hospital
(Hawaii Supreme Court 25653 (PDF))

May 2004: stopped being involved in the day-to-day affairs of running the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii
(from 29 Feb 2008 article in the Honolulu Advertiser)

14 Jul 2004: Judge Maldonado of the Monterey County Appellate Division of the Superior Court of California agrees that the 1977 injunction had been voided in 1981, and that the 2001 lawsuit should've been charged under California stalker statutes, not violation of the 1977 injunction. (Wagner v. Flippo 2005 - No. C 05-02863 JSW)

Jul-Sep 2004: alleged to have transmitted personal information with intent to steal property from World Botanical Gardens, Inc.
(from 29 Feb 2008 article in the Honolulu Advertiser)

10 Sep 2004: alleged to have stolen $20k worth of property from World Botanical Gardens, Inc.
(from 29 Feb 2008 article in the Honolulu Advertiser)

24 Jan 2005: another new injunction against approaching or contacting Gail Morton is granted (as the 2001 injunction had expired).
(California Public Court Record H028942)

7 Jun 2005: filed appeal to reconsider an appeal of the 24 Jan 2005 injunction.
(California Public Court Record H028942)

Sep 2005: last known evidence of the existence of the Monterey Bay Perpetual Endowment Foundation for Wellness.

Sep 2005: Fraud/Misrepresentation case begins about the World Botanical Gardens in Nevada.
(Fraud/Misrepresentation Case CV05-02079, Washoe County, Nevada)

8 Nov 2005: Wagner files suit against the prosecutors from 2001, claiming wrongful prosecution for not having violated the 1977 injunction. The case is dismissed.
(Wagner v. Flippo 2005 - No. C 05-02863 JSW)

1 Dec 2005: Motion to reconsider Wagner v. Flippo is denied.
(more Wagner v. Flippo 2005)

3 Jan 2006: The Wagners file a motion to quash a subpoena of their bank account records. Presumably the subpoena is part of the legal battle with World Botanical Gardens, Inc.
(Hawaii No. 27745)

30 Jan 2006: The 3 Jan 2006 motion (attempt to quash a subpoena of their bank account records) is denied.
(Hawaii No. 27745)

7 Feb 2007: After a lengthy battle with World Botanical Gardens Inc. in Nevada, for engaging in fraud, freezing the garden's bank account, closing their website, and otherwise interfering in their business affairs, he's sentenced to 90 days in jail and several thousand dollars in fines.
(Fraud/Misrepresentation Case CV05-02079, Washoe County, Nevada)

May 2007: Forced to sell his share of the property holdings of the World Botanical Gardens in Nevada at public auction. Deemed vexatious litigants in Nevada.
(Fraud/Misrepresentation Case CV05-02079, Washoe County, Nevada)

10 May 2007: Gail Morton succeeds in having Wagner deemed a vexatious litigant in California.
(California Public Court Record H028942)

13 Jul 2007: The 30 Jan 2006 denial is affirmed. The Wagners' bank account records are successfully subpoenaed.
(Hawaii No. 27745)

7 Nov 2007: 24 Jan 2005 injunction against approaching or contacting Gail Morton stands, designation of Wagner as a "vexatious litigant" does not.
(California Public Court Record H028942)

14 Nov 2007: A $351,520 lien is put on World Botanical Gardens, Inc. property in Utah.
(#68419-2008, state of Utah)

17 Jan 2008: first recorded Wikipedia edit made on the name Oldnoah.

29 Feb 2008: indictment by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the botanical garden in Hawaii.
(29 Feb 2008 article at the Honolulu Advertiser, 14 Mar 2008 article at Hawaii Tribune-Herald, 28 Mar 2008 article at The Register (UK news website))

21 Mar 2008: files Sancho vs. DOE against the LHC in a federal district court in Hawaii.
(Sancho v. U.S. Department of Energy et al, case 1:2008cv00136)

26 Sep 2008: Sancho vs. DOE ends when Hawaiian Federal Judge Helen Gillmor officially declares that the American judicial system has no jurisdiction over the LHC.

Mar 2009: Ordered (along with two others) to pay $2.6 million to World Botanical Gardens, Inc. for theft, misrepresenting himself as a director after he'd been dismissed, and selling fake shares. The criminal indictments for Attempted Theft In The First Degree and Identity Theft In The First Degree are still pending.
(03 Mar 2009 BigIslandVideoNews.com, 08 Mar 2009 BigIslandVideoNews.com)

Present: directing the World Botanical Institute division of the Open Mind Foundation, where he claims to have a PhD.

Notes:
This timeline is a perpetual work-in-progress, though we've stopped actively digging for the most part (at the moment anyhow - Wagner and his minions have a tendency to keep coming back and motivating us to dig more). I didn't do most of the research that went into it - I just organized what other people found. This has truly been a group effort of the UCF.

Some more pretty flowers

2009-05-13T04:11:00.003-04:00

It turns out that the white flowers I posted last year also come in a couple shades of pink.

These are blooming by the door next to my office. The bushes that made last year's white flowers are currently demolished - someone trimmed them way, way down, and now they're only a couple feet tall.

Things learned from a week of wearing a pedometer

2009-05-12T03:45:00.002-04:00

A pedometer is a device that counts the number of steps walked, and also estimates distance covered (based on stride length) and calories burned in the process (based on body weight). I acquired one recently to find out how much walking I do in my daily life. It's an Omron HJ-112, and I have no idea how it works, except I keep imagining that it contains artificial semicircular canals. That's probably not it, but it manages to be pretty accurate as long as I either clip it to some part of my clothing that doesn't move much (the top of my pants works well) or keep it in a snug pocket. Too much swinging around in a loose pocket confuses it mightily, as does walking funny.

The recommended walk count is 10,000 steps per day. I get nowhere close to that. On a workday it tends to be somewhere between 2000 and 2500, and on weekends it's much less - but that's partly because I forget to wear it while I'm bumbling around at home. Could I actually manage 10k steps in a single day? Hmm. I'd probably have to leave the computer and go outside. o.O

Initial Thoughts on Star Trek: The Reboot

2009-05-09T23:38:00.001-04:00

I went in with no particular expectations. I'd not gone out of my way to read any descriptions of the movie, so I didn't know a whole lot other than that it existed and was going to have an all-new TOS cast.

1. They weren't kidding when they said "reboot." It was not hyperbole. o.O

On the pro side, people who have never seen any Star Trek before will probably enjoy this movie quite a lot - especially the next generation down. It's a good pilot-type story for introducing new characters and setting. The rebooted characters have just enough development on them to get things started, and now that they have license to pretty much ignore everything that happened after Enterprise, they can basically go anywhere they want with it.

On the con side (the retcon side?), I kind of liked what was there before....

2. People who have read a lot of Star Trek TOS Pocketbook novels may be at a disadvantage for enjoying the movie, especially if they read and liked Enterprise: The First Adventure, Final Frontier (the book by Diane Carey, not the movie), and Kobayashi Maru. The story the movie tells bears no relation to what the books say. On the other hand, the books are technically non-canon, so it's not exactly an arguable point. (Except possibly to argue against reading media tie-in novels, ever - but then you'd miss out on a lot of great stories.)

On the other hand, those who haven't read any of the novels may not like the discrepancies and total departures from previous canon either, so maybe I'm not saying anything useful here.

3. Apparently they decided to aim for comedy. Unfortunately, the villain was kind of cardboard as a result, and there were some plot holes big enough to drive a starship through. Also, the impact that should've been there for *mumble mumble* (!) and *mumble mumble mumble* (T.T) was decidedly nerfed.

That's all I should probably say about it at the moment. I might do a more detailed post later, when more people have seen the movie and I can stop worrying about spoilers. My reaction overall: mixed.

On another note, I was the only one who dressed up for the occasion (finally got an excuse to wear my Spock shirt!), and everybody looked at me funny. This town has no clue how to do geek properly. T.T

Hey look! Bakho's on TV!

2009-05-08T01:40:00.003-04:00

Bakho, for those who don't follow this blog regularly, is a good friend of mine from Croatia, a psychology student in Zagreb, and one of my favorite RPoLians. He's the guy with the megaphone that appears at 5:12 and 6:41.

What's he doing? Why has there been a countrywide uprising going on in Croatia for the past three weeks? Because he and his fellow students (and many of their fellow citizens) believe that all have the right to free public higher education. Presently, about half of them have to pay for theirs - which they believe is wrong. So they've staged barricades of the colleges of several cities, not preventing anyone from entering or leaving the buildings but disallowing all lectures by being loud and disruptive.

It doesn't sound like the sort of thing that should work. It sounds completely unrealistic, in fact, especially when one wonders where governmental funding is supposed to come from. Well, taxes of course - and as the students' argument goes, there's a lot of wasteful spending going on that could (and should) be cut - like expensive public works in whole other countries and new sports stadiums.

But it seems to be working anyway. The government hoped that they'd get bored and go away. Three weeks later, however, they're still there - and someone leaderlike is probably going to have to Do Something.

As for me, well, I hope bakho remembers to eat regularly and get some sleep once in a while. And that he passes all the exams he's not been studying for, when it's all over. (And that he gets back to running his RPoL game. >.> ) Meanwhile: Vive La Révolution. :)

Recent Reading Vol. 2

2009-04-27T18:29:00.001-04:00

What I read in 2008:

1. Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
2. Dzur by Steve Brust
3. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
5. Thud! by Terry Pratchett
6. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
7. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
8. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
9. Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett
10. Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
11. Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
12. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
13. Mort by Terry Pratchett
14. Blue Moon by Laurell K. Hamilton

I stopped keeping track mid-October. There may have been others after that point that I've forgotten. On the other hand, Nanowrimo happened in November, and December had interstate travel in it, so it's just as likely I didn't read anything after that.

What I know I've read so far in 2009 (not in order):

1. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
2. The Last Colony by John Scalzi
3. Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi
4. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
5. On Writing by Stephen King

I'm trying to get my library habit started back up. Something I've noticed, though, is an interest in memoirs and nonfiction. Often, the first parts of a book I'll read are the author notes. I also enjoy following the lives of people with completely different lives than mine - to see what paths they've travelled and how they came to be the way they are today (yay blogs :) ). Since there's a library to explore, I may have to do some more in-depth exploring along those lines...

What do I believe?

2009-04-19T23:42:00.000-04:00

Fellow UCFer Jeri lost her husband very suddenly a month ago, and asked for thoughts on life after death. Here are some of mine.

My father survived his death, and I saw him in the corner of the ceiling behind me when I went to visit his body. It was one of the most distressing things I've ever seen - for here was my father, in the room with me, but he wasn't in his body. His body lay before me and looked just like any other inanimate object, a piece of furniture, like it had never been alive. And he, no longer hidden beneath all those representative facades that everyone wears as they go through life in various roles, he was purely him.

I don't know that I'd call it a soul, because that word is laden with so many connotations from every religion. Maybe spirit, or (as I called it before I knew anyone else had vocabulary for the same concepts) essence. Everyone has an essence, and when they are open and being themselves, glimpses show through. Right after my father died was when I saw the whole thing, he as himself and completely true.

I was very upset, because due to a miscommunication between the hospital staff and the rest of my family, nobody warned me before I stepped into the room that he was dead. My first instinct was to grab hold of him and put him back in, but I didn't know how and also thought that might be bad. I wanted to turn around and look at him directly, but there was the nurse with me, and what would she think of me if I did? So we didn't talk to each other, and I'll always wish that i'd been better prepared so that we could.

After that, there came the dreams. He would visit me and try to talk to me. The first one, my mundane dream had taken me out into our garage, and he was standing there like he always did when he smoked, and he asked how we were doing. We talked while my own dream tried to call me back, until eventually I was distracted and pulled back in. Other times, we were in our original house, in his office area on the third floor.

But his questions almost never made any sense. Dreams are places where reality is ever-shifting, where things change around as attention shifts from moment to moment, and where communication doesn't happen in speech, but in symbols and emotion. But he kept coming back and we kept trying.

A lot of the early ones were colored with dark melancholy, and I remember them all as being tinted blue. There was one in particular where we were on a very long journey, on a flat, featureless road across an empty plain. I drove while he wallowed in despair. Our car broke down and we stopped at a tiny motel. He was blind stinking drunk, chain smoking, in a completely self-destructive mood, and absolutely did not want to go anywhere. I think he wanted to just lie there and rot away. But I knew we had to keep moving, he had to get to where he was going (which I knew in the dream, but don't remember now). Our car disappeared at some point while we were resting - while he was resting while I was scouting ahead. Forward momentum was clearly going to be totally hopeless, because the only way to continue was on foot. I accepted that with quiet resignation, because stopping wasn't actually an option. But he didn't want to go, so I had to half drag, half carry him along. Finally he turned to me and asked, why would I want to help a sad, pathetic, miserable wretch like him? couldn't I see how worthless he was? And I stopped, the journey disappeared as I turned to him and replied (and I think my voice resounded through the land), because he was my father and I loved him, what kind of stupid question was that? now come on!

I like to think that I helped him along the way to where he was going. As time went on, the blue melancholy tinting went away, and there were dreams tinted in yellow. In the next to last dream, he appeared to me outside some kind of public building (a school, maybe), and he was in good spirits. We did our usual try at talking, where he asked questions that made no sense and my answers probably made less sense, and then I thought that was the end. After that, I assumed he had moved on and all was well with him.

But several months later, he was back with the blue tinting. I didn't handle that visit well at all. What are you doing back here? You're supposed to have moved on! If that's not what really happened, leave me to my fictional belief that I helped you and that all is well now and that you're gone. And he withdrew, and I haven't seen him since. And now I'll always wonder what that last visit had been about, and wish I had been better prepared to listen.

So what do I believe, about what happens after death? I don't know. I'm standing on the wrong side of the veil, on the beach at the edge of the sea, and the ones who have departed are seeing things and doing things and concerned with things that I couldn't begin to comprehend.

Oh, The Pressure

2009-04-14T15:52:00.000-04:00

My blog is up to six followers. Last week there were only three. I should probably say something entertaining. o.O

Downsizing

2009-04-05T03:23:00.000-04:00

Despite the low pay, the perks of working where I do largely outweigh the lack of money to do a lot of other things. Such as:

a) No dress code. I can wear whatever I want.
b) No set lunchtimes. I can eat whenever I want for as long as I want. (I prefer to just munch on things all day long while I work, instead of having an actual mealtime.)
c) No required clock-in/clock-out times. I can work whenever I want, so long as I do 40 hours' worth per week.
d) Full internet access. I can do whatever else I want at work, so long as I do 40 hours' worth of work per week. (We're not allowed to look at porn, and we'd get in serious trouble if caught, but it's not actually blocked (at least, not as far as I know. I've never checked).)
e) No restrictions on how we decorate our work areas. (Weaponry isn't permitted, but compared to tales I've heard of other places, that's minor - and doesn't really apply to me anyhow.)
f) Beautiful workplace. We're next to a river, surrounded by trees, and have our own nature trail.

My first office was in a large labspace at the far end of a building with no other offices near it, and I had it all to myself. I had multiple large windows with great views of the trees and river. I had full control of the thermostat, could play my music as loud as I wanted, and could eat whatever I wanted (e.g. Indian curry was not a problem). When I code, I tend to do a lot of pacing, muttering, and bouts of maniacal laughter - which was possible without bothering anyone else.

Then some drama happened with the owner of the lab, and my second office was in a cluster of other offices, and about a quarter the size of the first office. It had a single small window with a view of a parking lot and a brick building. It had thin walls, no thermostat control, and a tantrum-prone grad student across the hall who came in no more than twice a week on no predictable schedule and hated my music, my food, and the way I breathed.

Then some politics elsewhere shook out, and my third office is in the main building, is shared with someone else, and my part of it is half the size of my second office. I have no view of our small window because the other guy decided to take the half that includes it, and then he put up a bookshelf between us. Despite the lack of view and thermostat control, it's still a step up from Office #2 because the walls are thick, and everyone around me is on a predictable schedule - I can plan food, music, and the bulk of coding accordingly.

Last week I got an email about how my phoneline has been scheduled to transfer to a "workstation" in our new, almost-finished building. My fourth office will be a cubicle in a large, central plaza, with about half the space of my current office.

I'm wondering if I can beg my way back into my first office (the drama resolved while I was in the process of moving out, and then it was too late). If not, my new workschedule will resemble my current one, but the four days will be Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday - and on Tues/Thurs I'll probably just not arrive until 4:30pm.

If there's ever a fifth move, I'll probably have to request a red stapler.

Soup Without Cornstarch

2009-04-03T02:52:00.000-04:00

Today I ordered some egg drop soup from a drive-thru Chinese takeout (not the one I worked at), and asked for it to be made without any cornstarch.

The lady at the window remarked that the kitchen staff prefer it that way too. She had never tried it that way herself, but now she was curious.

I told her that the reason cornstarch is added is because Americans like it that way. Americans prefer their broths and sauces to be thick, so Americanized Chinese food has cornstarch in everything. But Chinese people themselves prefer thin and watery.

("Americans" is the term that Chinese communities use amongst themselves to refer to white people. That or "foreigner" - as in foreign to China. The thought that it doesn't technically apply when all people mentioned are living in America, never really comes to mind. (Black people are just called "black people."))

Of course, then I had to start saying "non-Asians" in order to make sense to the window lady, who was white. I probably still managed to offend her. Doh.

More Azaleas

2009-03-22T15:24:00.000-04:00

We've been having lots of flowers here. It turns out that the magenta azaleas across from my patio are still alive and well - and right now they're blooming with a vengeance. I can also see whites, pale pinks, and salmon pinks from here, though there aren't as many and most of them are nearly done blooming now.

Day of Silence

2009-03-20T02:10:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, one of our members suffered a terrible personal tragedy. Out of respect for her loss, the UCF member blogs will be offline today. Our thoughts and prayers are with her. We will return tomorrow.

Quiescence

2009-03-17T20:45:00.000-04:00

I have nothing to say.

I have lots to say, actually. I'm just not in the right frame of mind to organize my thoughts into anything coherent, that won't somehow manage to offend everyone left and right. I haven't been in a good frame of mind for almost a month now. Hence the silence, which is better than anything I might possibly say.

So instead, I'll just list everything I've been up to lately. Maybe it'll be an interesting read to someone somewhere.

1. Work

a) I'm making a database of every satellite image I've ever made. They date from late 1997 to present, and I've finished 2003 but haven't yet started 2004.

b) There's either something odd going on in the water off the southeast U.S. coast, or both satellites pointed at it are glitching in exactly the same way. Which is it? I'm assembling the overall big picture so that we can look at it and hopefully figure that out. This is taking a while.

2. Play

a) The RPoL chat community has become about twice as active as it used to be. First there was a keystone banning; suddenly, a slowly dying chat sprang back into full health and vibrancy overnight. Less than a week later, someone posted a thread in RPoL's community forum, asking about the chat - and for a while we were getting a dozen new visitors per day. That's settled down to 3-5 new regulars now, but it's still quite busy.

b) My favorite GM came back after a 5-month absence, restarted two of his games and made a third.

c) Mad Scientist on Facebook. T.T I have zombies, robots, a SkyCom AI, and a doomsday device. And I'm making more! It turns out that this particular game is the perfect speed for playing in between rounds of working, so I expect I'll be playing quite a lot.

3. Writing

a) Nonfiction is basically at a standstill (in case that wasn't obvious by observing my blog). I haven't written any new eHow articles either.

b) I've been putting a lot of work into Vengeance Returns. It's accumulating a few hundred words or so every other night. It turns out that midnight to dawn is an excellent time for writing. Unfortunately, this also means less sleep, which is probably contributing to the whole bad frame of mind thing.

That pretty much covers it, I think. How are you?

Azaleas again

2009-02-22T07:12:00.001-05:00

Last summer, a bunch of overhanging tree limbs got removed from the fenceline between my apartment building and the patch of woods behind it. They destroyed some of the brush lower to the ground in the process, and I was afraid there wouldn't be any more azaleas.

Well, there aren't any in front of my own patio anymore, but some of the other ones are still alive. They started blooming last weekend:

There are also a couple other colors, but they're farther into the woods and I can't get close enough for good pictures. Here's last year's pictures (which technically weren't actually taken last year, but that's when I posted them ;) ).

Couple Quick Followups

2009-02-19T15:29:00.004-05:00

What electric outlets and light switches look like in Croatia

Comment about the light switches in particular: the Europeans in my audience took one look at the example in my post and basically all thought, "wow, retro." Apparently light switch technology is more advanced over there than here.

So is their dishwasher technology, for that matter. Ours are big clunky obvious machines that tend to be fairly noisy when they're running. Theirs come with front panelling that match their cabinets, and are so quiet it's hard to tell that they're on. I wouldn't mind having one of those. :)

Some insightful commentary inspired by the 25 Things meme

It started as a reply to some whining going on in the mainstream media about the meme, and tangented out to observations about modern-day racism. Good food for thought.

Fox News: News on an informativeness level you'd get from reading my blog (if I ever did news)

2009-02-18T15:52:00.004-05:00

Today I went to a pizza buffet for lunch. I foolishly chose a seat right under one of their TVs without checking to see what was playing. It turned out to be Fox News.

I now understand why everyone calls it Faux News. o.O Did any of those people even go to journalism school? What happened to reporting verified facts and all the opposing viewpoints surrounding a newsworthy event in an unbiased manner?

Example: 16 year old girl found dead, another found unconscious nearby, at Fort Lewis (an army base in Washington). Something about drugs and one of the soldiers being involved (no really, that's all the info I managed to get out of their story). Fox News says "well gee, they were civilians, so we don't even know how they got on the base in the first place, I think they have to be escorted by a military person or something? And their IDs get checked? And there's some kind of curfew involved about that but we're not sure." Uhhh. IT'S YOUR JOB TO FIND ALL THAT STUFF OUT BEFORE YOU GET ON THE AIR.

They did have one report that I wanted to hear. Facebook is currently having a debacle about its Terms of Use. I learned this last night because they put up a big sign on everyone's home pages, and also a number of friends had status updates talking about it. I read the sign, then checked their terms of use page, found the problem paragraph, read it, discussed it with a friend, etc. What did Fox News say? "Oh yeah, Facebook is trying to claim ownershp of everyone's info." Uhhhh. No. >.< DID IT OCCUR TO YOU TO READ THE TERMS OF USE THAT YOU'RE REPORTING ABOUT? OR WAS YOUR COMPREHENSION SO BAD THAT ALL YOU CAN DO IS REPEAT THE HEARSAY?

Yeah, I think I'll go back to getting all my news from other people's blogs now.

One of life's little slow-motion mysteries

2009-02-16T23:00:00.003-05:00

Today I caused the collapse of a house of cards.

I also learned some disturbing things about a second house of cards. Will it also collapse in the wake of the first one? Or will it remain standing to get bigger until, when it finally does collapse by some other force, its dust will take months to settle instead of only weeks?

And will the house builder ever learn a thing?

A Crash of Waves

2009-02-13T21:49:00.002-05:00

My original low-resolution scan of a photo I took in southern California in 1994:

I passed a more recent, higher-resolution version of the scan to a friend (Robert Sloan 2), who turned it into art:

It's in soft pastels, for a contest that involves expensive prizes if he wins. He hears back about it probably in April.

Then I sold the high-resolution scan to BigStockPhoto.com. :)

(... and that's pretty much it for "good things that have happened to me this week." The rest of the week has been from blah to crummy.)

A weird little geological bowl

2009-02-07T17:44:00.001-05:00

This cliff is part of a rocky beach somewhere in southern California. Notice how there's a dark-colored band of rock that winds around the bottom, like a bowl, that there's more tightly folded light-colored rock in the bowl, and there's a big crack down the middle (with the trees growing in it) that doesn't seem to go through the bottom of the bowl.

My first thought was that the crack is a fault. The light-colored rocks on either side of it don't appear to meet up with each other. However, because the dark-colored band is continuous along the bottom, it might be a dike that just weathered faster than the surrounding rock.

Which is not to say that there aren't faults in this picture. To the right of the bowl, some of the light-colored rock is doing some interesting folding action, and in one spot it comes to an end against another band of the same stuff.

All in all, a fun little head-turner for the casual roadside geologist. ;)

As for where it is, I hope someone out there can tell me. The picture was taken in December 1994, and is of the same place as these:

I was there with some extended family during a two-week visit, my first trip to California, and they were showing us around.

I mention all this now because I just found the original photos while excavating my storeroom, and was rescanning Crash of Waves for a friend to turn into art.

25 Things

2009-02-06T05:14:00.001-05:00

There's been an Internet meme going around Facebook for the past month or so, and recently it has spilled out into the blogosphere. The basic gist is: "list 25 random things about yourself."

I'm going to cheat on mine, and use a similar meme from last year for ten of them. Also, I'm planning to copy/paste this into Facebook as well, where some of the audience hasn't heard from me for 17 years, so not all of this will be new stuff to people reading along here ...

1. I was supposed to become a world-famous concert harpist. My instructor, a world-famous concert harpist herself, so believed in me that she gave me lessons worth $100/hr for free. Unfortunately, it turned out that I wasn't that big a fan of classical music, and was even less a fan of the associated social trappings that went along with being a concert harpist. Me and high society fancy schmancy schmoozing - they don't go together.

2. I was in the children's choir for a production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, which we performed for him on his 70th birthday (1988) in Massachusetts.

3. I once stood in the eye of a hurricane. Bonnie came straight up the Cape Fear River in North Carolina in 1998, and she moved so slowly that we were in her eye for an hour.

4. I spent a couple summers helping a fellow grad student do research on royal terns. It involved lots of time on small sandy islands in the middle of the Cape Fear River (their breeding grounds).

One time we were late getting off before low tide, and we got stranded. There's a picture somewhere of us tugging our 8-foot motorboat through ankle-deep water, between the channel markers (for a channel that clearly no longer existed; they'd evidently not dredged recently).

5. The most fun part of the tern study was the annual banding event. Once the tern chicks are old enough to be out of the nest but not yet old enough to fly, they all get herded down the beach into a corral. Then they get metal bands clamped around their legs. They're really cute at that stage - little white fluffballs with feet.

We also did a few laughing gull chicks. They're pretty cute too, if you don't think too much about what they grow into. Laughing gull chicks will fall instantly asleep if you drop a towel on their heads. So, there was much chasing them around with towels after we were done with the terns.

6. I also helped another grad student with an age and growth study on some juvenile groupers. My part in it was to keep them clean and fed in some outdoor fishtanks. While I was doing that for the groupers, I also kept some snappers - since they were the subject of my own research. They were supposed to all die of cold before the winter really set in. The groupers did. But the snappers, whose range is farther south than the groupers, were a lot tougher than anyone expected. So every two weeks all winter long, I put on five layers of short-sleeved shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, scarf and winter hat, and plunged my arms up to the armpits into icy cold water so I could suck the uneaten food and algae out of their tank.

7. Whenever I go on offshore science cruises, there's always at least one crewmember who is really big into deep sea fishing. This works out well since we get to eat a lot of fresh fish that way.

One time someone caught a 100 lb yellowfin tuna. It took 45 minutes to reel in. The guy cleaned it immediately after it was caught, and sliced off chunks of superfresh sushi for the rest of us. While its muscles were still twitching, even. It was a bit warmer than I liked, but the next day it got served up properly chilled with the wrong kind of rice, the wrong kind of soy sauce, and tubed wasabi. It was still yummy. :)

8. The most unusual thing I ever pet-sat was a 10-gallon tank of 20ish juvenile clownfish. (The kind that likes anemones.) The clownfish in the biology building's lobby aquarium had spawned, the eggs had hatched, and one of the other grad students had taken them under her wing. They were about half-dollar sized or so when she brought them over and set them up on the floor of my living room for three days.

9. I once swam with a barracuda. This was in the Florida Keys, near the end of high school. Without my glasses on I couldn't see what it was, only that it was long and skinny and fairly large, so I was following it around. Then I noticed that everyone else had fled to the other side of the boat...

10. Every year, the place where I work holds an Open House, where we let the general public mob the place. It's supposed to show off what great science we do, so that they'll want to give us more of their tax dollars. But in practice, most of it is a bunch of games and activities for small children. I've done the rounds to all sorts of things, from manning the check-in desk to helping with boat tours to explaining arcane oceanographic equipment. One year I was dressed up as Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. It was like being a celebrity. Small children loved me, grownups were confused ("is that a cucumber?"), and the DNR boat patrol staff wanted to use me for target practice.

11. I've been on a horse exactly once. (Not counting the merry-go-round live ponies at travelling carnivals and etc.) It didn't much care for my opinions on where we ought to go, and kept trying to run me into low-hanging tree branches. I was sore for a week after that ride.

12. The most fun thing I saw in Hanauma Bay, Hawaii, when I was snorkeling there last spring was a sea cucumber. It looked like a gigantic fat black worm. It was kind of squishy when I prodded it with my foot.

13. In college we were required to take a foreign language, and the language I took was Tibetan. The first year was awesomeness. The instructor was all about an immersion approach, and we learned things in the same order that we would've if it was a first language - first some hearing and speaking, then the alphabet and reading and writing. I also had fun comparing it to Mandarin, as some of the basic words are similar. I remember a lot more of the basic phrases ("what is this/that? this is a table, where is the library" etc.) than I do anything about French, which was three high school years of grammar drills.

The second year got very esoteric, with an instructor who thought we wanted to learn how to read ancient religious texts rather than be passably conversational if we went there. I lost interest and didn't take a fourth semester like I'd originally thought I would. The only thing I learned there was that I have an excellent short-term rote memory. The exams asked us to translate 2-3 passages of Tibetan into English, given 20-45 possible ones that might be on them. The final exam had a ton more passages than the midterm, I think because the instructor didn't understand how I could've possibly passed the midterm, and wanted to make sure I couldn't do it by sheer memory alone. I did.

14. It was in Montana that I learned just how short my physical limits are. Most of us started out the 6-7 week geology field courses in bad physical shape. The difference was that they became fit, while I did not. I reached an early plateau, and thereafter I had to start walking much earlier than everyone else if I wanted any hope of being not so far behind that I couldn't still see the next farthest behind student when they reached the next station. It was the first I'd ever really run into any limits on things I can do if I put my mind to it. Those field courses are a large part of the reason why I dropped geology, though I still love rocks.

15. My favorite subliminal advertising is Wall Drug.

16. Someday I want to do a grand months-long roadtrip all around the continental U.S. I figure I'd go across on 80 or 90, down the west coast, then across again on 20, hitting all the major national parks along the way.

17. I've been to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and Tijuana in Mexico, and I didn't drink at either of those places. There was plenty of fun to be had by watching other people having fun, and enjoying the company I was with.

18. When I was ten I wanted to be a writer. Then I was supposed to become a world-famous musician (see #1). Then in college I fled from music into science. Then near the end of grad school I lost all will to live for a while, and passion for doing science along with that. Now I'm working a science job (but nothing resembling anything I studied), and I'm back to wanting to be a writer.

19. I've worked at Wendy's, Einstein's Bagels, and a local-run Chinese takeout. Each time I learned all sorts of interesting things about life, the universe, and everything. Everyone (able-bodied) should do some food service at least once in their lives, especially at a well-managed, well-run one, and see what the world looks like from the other side of the counter.

20. For those who may have missed the memo (or joined us after it), I'm in the T part of the LBGTQ spectrum. This is a social birth defect, not a lifestyle choice. I say "social" because we transpeople aren't mentally or physically defective, by and large - but we have some interesting problems trying to interact with other people. I have male body language and male reactions to things, which nobody expects or comprehends out of a female body. People tend to get confused, some decide that I'm somehow being "rude" though they might not be able to pinpoint exactly why (it has to do with body language microcues), and a lot decide it's easier to just stop talking to me. Online I find it much simpler to present myself as male to people who have never known me in real life. (I'd prefer to not have to specify at all, but some people get really weirded out if they don't know. Also, English unfortunately has gendered third person pronouns.)

21. I love food. I'll try almost anything at least once (by "almost" I don't mean things like balut), and will discuss food at great length at the slightest excuse.

22. I used to be really big into Star Trek. Then when that started petering out, I was really big into Stargate. Now that's petering out too, and I'm not big into any particular sci-fi franchise at the moment.

23. Enya's Orinoco Flow (Sail Away), which I first heard while in high school, was the first I knew that there was any kind of music besides classical, pop rock, and country. I was really big into New Age instrumentals for a while (but not Yanni :p). Then at some point I discovered I liked alternative and metal. And that's where I am now, more or less, with my interests mostly for European metal. But I'll listen to just about anything. Even some occasional hiphop.

24. I'm an awful teacher, but an excellent tutor. Standing me up in front of a classroom of 20-30 students is a bad, bad idea. But sit me down with someone who just needs a nudge in their thinking in just the right place, and epiphanies happen. Partly I think it was because the tutee was of the right mindframe by asking for help, and was therefore listening to begin with. But there's still some art involved in knowing not only what to say, but also when to talk and when to wait in silence for the wheels to spin. Most of my tutees only ever came in once, and then I never saw them again - but then their friends all came. ;)

25. Yoga didn't seem like much when it was my mother doing the poses out of an exercise book when I was a kid. Then a year ago a chiropractor ordered me to start going to classes twice a week. Now I think it's awesome. I'm stretching all sorts of muscles I didn't know I had, and even building some new ones (slowly). And I keep trying to talk everyone else into it too. ;)

Hmmmm. It took me all day to come up with all that, even with help from the previous meme. Now I'm going back to not talking much about myself. :p

A highly technical geek story (or, a farcical tragedy)

2009-02-02T19:59:00.000-05:00

Hooking up a printer in XP is supposed to consist of these easy steps:

1. Plug the printer into the computer.
2. Turn on the computer.
3. Turn on the printer.
4. Wait for the computer to fail to autodetect the printer even though it's on a USB port, then go to Control Panel, then Printers, then Add Printer.
5. When the computer asks, insert the CD that came with the printer. (This step may take a while if the CD in question is nowhere near the printer and hasn't been thought of since printer purchase, and is lying in the bottom of a box somewhere.)
6. Wait for the computer to find the printer info on the CD and copy over all files.
7. Print out a test page. Voila.

What actually happened:

Well, we got through step 5 with only a minor bump in the proceedings (when there was much rummaging around the house to find the aforementioned CD, accompanied by rumors that it might've been thrown away, and also a fair amount of angst by the child who most wanted the printer to be working).

Then came Step 6.

I should stop and mention at this point that the XP in question was running in Chinese. I couldn't read a darn thing I was doing, and the friend who could read it wasn't at all computer-savvy and didn't understand everything she read. Also, her English is weak and my Mandarin is weaker. Yay for universal picture icons. :)

Anyway, so there was a bit of a problem when it turned out that the computer was unable to locate all files on the CD. It wanted to find a somethingsomething.dll that didn't exist, in a directory that didn't exist. As usual when dealing with Windows, I quickly gave up trying to look at files via the GUI and went over to DOS, so I could see what all was on the CD. There wasn't a "cht" directory, but there were a number of other three-letter ones that looked like "rus" and "fra" and "dan." Presumably different languages then. So, not knowing what the dll file was for, I found a dll file with the correct name in the dan directory, and told the computer to use that.

Moving on to Step 7! I tried to print something. An error box popped open. It was in ... Danish? o.O

It turns out that most freebie online translators don't do Danish, and the ones that do, don't do it very well. (Or "dan" stands for some other language that isn't immediately obvious.) I think the error was trying to say something about low ink. But I don't know. The printer itself complained that it was out of paper (it wasn't). We didn't get it to print anything. :(

Dandelion!

2009-02-01T15:16:00.000-05:00

Most people think of dandelions as a weed plant, but there's nothing like a lush green grassy meadow dotted with these cheery yellow flowers. They're edible, too. They don't grow well down here in the coastal southeastern U.S., alas.

Big Machines

2009-01-31T15:38:00.000-05:00

What caught my attention about Warrel Dane's cover of Lucretia, My Reflection was, first, the singer's growly voice and impassioned lyrics, and second, the fact that the opening lines reminded me of Billy Joel's No Man's Land.

(actual song starts at 0:39)

Both talk about being near big machines, and at the time I couldn't remember what No Man's Land was about. Though someone better at BS than me could probably make a profound statement about the similarities between empires and suburbs.

Anyway, it turned out to be a cover of a Sisters of Mercy song.

I've never been a big fan of Sisters of Mercy (a classic goth band), possibly because I once had to listen to one of their albums on repeat every week for several months. It was the mood music for our Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop until I finally complained about it. After that we tried other music until we finally settled on silence.

Maybe what I really need is metal versions of all of their songs. ;)

State of my Chives

2009-01-30T03:10:00.004-05:00

My chives are the only plants left in my lush, expansive garden. Here they are, not so lush anymore, and with flowerstalk stumps everywhere. Ironically I eat more baked potatoes during the winter than the summer when they're growing well.

The tomatoes died to the last cold snap. :( Now that I have some clue what I'm doing with them, though, I'm looking forward to the next growing season.

A Simple Test

2009-01-29T14:02:00.000-05:00

There is a very simple, straightforward test for paranormal abilities.

Two people, one who sends and one who receives. The sender thinks about something (e.g. a number, a color, a geometric shape), and the receiver reports what the sender is thinking. Repeat that a few dozen times. To make it all scientifically rigorous, you put them in separate rooms where they can't see each other. To make it even more rigorous, you require that they don't know each other, and possibly have never even met before the test.

That last requirement basically dooms the test to fail, at least with the way it would work to my personal understanding. But even without requiring that they don't know each other, the average person off the street still has no idea how to send or receive.

Most people broadcast their thoughts the way a light bulb gives off light. It goes out in all directions with no particular destination. It's stronger if there's any kind of emotional attachment to the thought, and weaker if the thought is neutral.

But to send a thought to a specific person, two things have to happen. First, you have to be able to find the other person. How close another mind is has nothing to do with physical geography, it has more to do with whether they're thinking about you (so it helps if they actually know you). How easy they are to identify depends on how well you know them - how well you can recognize their unique signatures. (Everyone has a unique signature.)

Also, sending a thought is more like beaming a laser. You want to focus it. Otherwise it takes a lot of energy and you get tired really really fast - and then you can't keep it up for the entire duration of the test.

Then there's receiving. Most people would think of it as sitting there passively, waiting for the outside thought to appear. However, a skilled receiver can also go over to the sender's mind and actively retrieve the thought (which is useful when the sender obviously has no idea how to send). This is easier if sender and receiver have compatible minds (are operating on the same wavelength, so to speak) - and, of course, if they are actually familiar with each other.

I once sat in on an informal run of this test at a college parapsychology club. The club leader sent, and everyone else wrote down what they thought he was thinking. We did numbers and colors, I believe. It took me all of the first round and part of the second to work out the mechanism involved (that is, the sender had no clue what he was doing and I had to go there) - so I scored low on the first one and high on the second. Statistically speaking, however, if your scientific experiment consists of aggregating everyone's scores in the room (which is what sensible scientists would do), your conclusion will be that it's not significantly different from random. Because most people don't know how to send or receive.

On consumer surveys

2009-01-28T22:56:00.000-05:00

Dear Shopper,

Once in a while we carefully select individuals in your community - those whom we feel represent the smartest, most value conscious shoppers. Then we use some of our research budget to find out exactly what these smart shoppers really want.

If our hunch is right, you are such a person.

[...]

When you speak your mind, better products get to market. The companies are happy. Consumers are happy. It's really that simple.

[...]

Sincerely,

Letter with a Consumer Survey where 90% of the Products Don't Apply To Me

I really only have one thing on my mind at the moment. Russer's roast beef was the most awesome pre-packaged deli-sliced roast beef EVER. It was the only one that didn't include sodium nitrite as an ingredient, and the taste was outstanding. It has disappeared from all of my local grocery stores. If the reason it's gone is because Russer has stopped making it, then the opinion on my mind is that they should BRING IT BACK.

I think that covers it.

Beyond that: I used to get paid in cold, hard cash to do these surveys. Now all that's on offer is coupons to products that I don't use, and auto-entries into sweepstakes. I much preferred the cash.

Year of the Ox

2009-01-26T18:57:00.000-05:00

I should say something about the Chinese New Year, especially since today begins the year of the Ox, which makes it my year.

But I don't have anything grandiose to say. Life is sailing along, one day after another just like it would be at any other time. I'm alive, I'm awake, and I'm hopeful that this year, my year, I'll accomplish lots of things. I want to finally clear out the old, which starts with the storeroom I've begun to excavate. I want to finally finish a novel (any novel, just one!). I want to say the things I need to say, do the things I was put here to do, and generally just keep on living as well as I've been living.

The winds of change are blowing through the nation as well as my life, and I hope to make the most of whatever's coming.

Domestic Outlets

2009-01-25T18:50:00.002-05:00

Apparently, the most fascinating part of my previous post was the wall outlet. It inspired a lengthy conversation about wall outlet differences in appearance between the U.S. and Croatia. So, for bakho's edification, a documentary. :)

Here are the three main types of outlets found standard in most USian houses and apartments. From left to right, these are TV cable jack, electric, and phone jack:

On the electric outlet, note that there are two slits and a round hole, where one slit is bigger than the other. Originally (back a few decades), outlets were just two equal-sized slits. Then one day, for safety reasons, they started making them with one larger than the other, so that plugs can only fit into them one-way. A while after that, the third hole was added, for even more safety. I think it's for "grounding" purposes.

Here are the different types of plugs that go into the electric outlets:

The green plug has two equal-sized prongs. The gray plug has the type where one prong is bigger than the other. The white plug has three prongs. All three of them are in use, depending on what's at the other end of the cord, so our wall outlets are designed to handle all three.

And here are the phoneline and TV cable plugs:

(Maybe our next longwinded conversation will cover the differences between dialtones and ringtones from country to country.)

And finally, just to round things out, our standard USian light switch:

UPDATE: Apparently, the most fascinating part of this post is the light switch. :p

Domestic Excavations

2009-01-24T18:31:00.005-05:00

I moved into my current apartment in 2002. Before that there was a period where I moved around a lot - including one year where I moved three times. After a while, there didn't seem much point in bothering to unpack, because soon I would just have to repack it all again.

It's now 2009. It's probably safe to unpack now. So I finally started going through my storeroom full of boxes that I've hauled from place to place since 1991. After removing all the empty boxes (I never break down boxes, it's annoying to have to retape them back up again later, see) and some other miscellaneous things, here's (most of) what I have left:

Over half of it appears to be school-related stuff (class notes and papers from high school, college, grad school). There are at least three boxes worth of stuff belonging to former SOs/housemates (but not all together, alas). The harp is a lever harp that doesn't hold its tune so well anymore due to neglect; it's from a friend who bought it with a broken base from an auction somewhere for $50, fixed the base but did not prettify the fix, eventually lost interest, and handed it down to me. The mound of papers next to the big black bin is what I'm currently sorting through; it seems to be half junk mail, and half daily-life detritus from circa 1996 (receipts, paycheck stubs, utility statements, etc.).

It's a little like opening a time capsule. I have other such paper piles in the other boxes, probably one for every move, as it was easiest just to dump together whatever I had at the time instead of figuring out what to keep and what to toss (which would happen at a hypothetical "later" that never came around until, well, now).

Yay unpacking. :)

Now it's real

2009-01-23T03:51:00.000-05:00

Seeing this picture is what brought home for me that President Obama is now really our president. Here he is, not speechifying or being in the spotlight of any ceremonies, but sitting behind a desk and doing his new job.

It's a nice thing to see. :)

(The picture is of him signing an order to close Guantanamo. I stole it from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I'm pleased about that, too. (The Guantanamo closing, not the theft.))

A simple, ordinary exchange

2009-01-22T01:41:00.002-05:00

There is a T intersection on my way to work, with a stop sign for the people coming out of the stem of the T. 90% of people on the main road turn right, into the stem. Therefore, people turning left out of the stem tend to assume that everyone coming down the road will be turning right; some of them are so sure of this that they don't bother to stop at their stop sign.

I go straight. I have no stop sign. In addition to slowing down and checking for cars as I approach (and occasionally wishing that there was a signal for "going straight"), I also routinely ping the minds of the other drivers.

This tells me several things:
a) their approximate emotional state;
b) their intentions for the intersection - which basically boil down to "stop and wait" or "go";
c) their receptiveness to outside messages.

Some of them will go through no matter who else is on the road, and they broadcast that at high volume (read: they're assholes). Some of them are completely oblivious to everything around them because they're driving on autopilot, and therefore won't notice any outside messages from the ether any more than they'll notice anything else, and they'll also go through no matter who else is on the road.

Most of them are fairly calm and alert, however. I go over to their minds and suggest that they wait. Once I've passed, I thank them for waiting, both as a message and with a puff of "feeling of goodwill" (assuming that I'm in a reasonably good mood myself, at least).

People at work (that is, part of the 10% of people who go straight) talk about how common it is to have accidents at that intersection. I've not had any problems.

Real Americans

2009-01-20T00:17:00.000-05:00

I spent my evening hanging out in the back of a seafood market.

It's run by friends who used to employ me at their Chinese takeout. They speak Fujian Chinese with each other, Spanish with their current employees, and a mix of English and Mandarin with me. All of their customers speak Black.

On Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, the night before Inauguration of our first black president, there was nowhere else I would've rather been.