A Portrait

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

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?

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.