Winter Storm a Bust

Well the big winter storm was pretty much a bust. We got a couple of inches of snow, then mostly rain. Most of the city shut down, even though by noon the major roads were only covered by water, and the smaller ones slush. Further south was actually worse. Atlanta had a serious ice storm.

I'm all set up to visit Duke on Feb 22, and I need to call UNC about a visit as well. UW has said they will be issuing invitations to a Feb 28 open house in "early February." I don't know if that's an all-expenses thing like Duke or UNC. In fact, I very much doubt it due to the size of the program. Other programs I have no idea. I inquired at Oregon State and they sent me back an email form letter confirming that they have all my materials and added "we'll get back to you" about a visit. Waiting is fairly painful; it sucks not knowing where you'll be in a few months.

Global Warming. Local Cooling.

We are indeed getting some snow -- probably close to 2 inches so far.

I read this morning on cnn.com about a project to model global climate change that recruits people to donate their idle computer cycles with a background process, just like that extraterrestrial project everyone was doing a few years ago. Apparently 95,000 people are participating, and the combined computing power is greater than the fastest supercomputer, though I'm a little skeptical on how that's being measured.

http://www.climateprediction.net

The interesting thing isn't the software -- it's the results. It's predicting a rise of between 2 and 11 degrees C (which is 3.6 to 19.8 degrees F!) with CO2 levels doubled over pre-industrial levels, which at the current rate will happen in the middle of this century! That's much worse than previous models, and would be disaster at the low end, and a catastrophe at the high end.

This is of no small interest to me. Not that I give a crap about civilization or anything, but global climate is one area of oceanography I'm strongly looking at specializing in. (Another would be coastal oceanography).

Snow/Sleet/Ice Is On the Way

We're supposed to get 2 to 4 inches of snow tomorrow, possibly mixed with some sleet or other random icy shit. Sucks. I hope get into Scripps just so I don't have to deal with this crap for five or six years.

I guess it'll be tolerable as long as the power stays on. But if there's an outage and I'm stuck here I'll go stir crazy, probably. Not to mention freeze my ass.

Lately I've been watching this new Craig Furguson guy who replaced Craig Kilborn on the Late Late Show. He seems amazingly good for a guy who just started doing a talk show, at least compared with Conan O'Brian's first year, which was a nightly train wreck.

Adios to Quantum Mechanics

I dropped my QM class. I was trying to work on the second weeks worth of homework and just wasn't into it. Professor stream-of-consciousness was just a little too out there, and I don't need that kind of grief.

Today I finally got ahold of somebody at the National Climatic Data Center about the data I need for my research project, and it turns out I can't have it. At least not unless I come up with hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. It seems like most of this data was generated by government reasearch, though. Could I file a Freedom of Information Act request?

I've got to give some sort of a talk for my Senior Seminar class in two weeks, but I have no idea what I want to talk about. I was thinking about something in theoretical computer science, but am having a hard time thinking of something that wouldn't require a ton of background to understand. Also, I seem to have forgotten just about everything I ever knew about it.

Johnny Carson died on Sunday, and for some reason I miss him. I was never a regular fan or anything, though when I was growing up he seemed like one of very few adults who were cool. I think my feelings have something to do with the fact that I always thought I'd see him again. After he retired it seemed certain that he would turn up on Letterman's show now and then, maybe host the Oscars, whatever. But other than a couple of cameos on Letterman, that was it. Gone. It reminded me of when John Lennon was shot. Everybody sort of figured the Beatles would do something again some day, but it never happened, and then all of a sudden it was official.

My mother called today and said that Ed, my brother-in-law, was in the hospital with meningitis. It turns out he wasn't and he didn't, but he was just out of the hospital with a serious inner ear infection that's in danger of turning into meningitis and he's going to have to have an operation next week to clear it up.

Jesus Jones It's Cold Out There

Middle of the damn afternoon and it's 19 motherhumping degrees outside, with a stiff breeze too. Unlike the northeast, which got buried in a record blizzard last night, we got less than an inch of snow.

Initial Reviews are Good

I got an email last night from Suzan L., the professor at Duke I talked to back in December. She says the graduate committee is impressed and she wants me to come for a campus visit. I'm trying to figure out when I can make that happen. Today I got a voice message for a professor at UNC who wants to talk to me.

The semester is getting started for real now (though I never really feel it's gotten started until I take my first exam). The physical oceanography course is even less substantive than I thought it was going to be -- a joke, really. Quantum mechanics continues to freak me out. We're learning some exotic tricks for doing certain integrals, and one or two of them would probably make most mathematicians roll over in their graves. Or at least dead mathematicians.

Without Apparent Irony...

Alaska

I just realized I haven't written anything about this yet: my sister and her family decided over the holidays to move to Alaska.

Or at least my sister and her husband did; it doesn't sound like the rest of the family is on board. Emily, who is 15, is as upset as can be and will be staying with my father until June so she can finish out the school year here. My sister also promised her that she can spend summers with my mother, so Idunno -- sounds like it may be September until she gets out there. Eddy, 14, has decided to live with his biological mother, which I didn't think had anything to do with Alaska, but my father thinks otherwise. What a mess. Jamie, Sam and Jennifer are too young to have much of an opinion I guess.

Personally I think they're nuts, and am predicting here and now that it will not last more than two or three years, if that. The place they are moving is in the panhandle, a tiny little touristy town called Sitka on one of the large coastal islands. It has a maritime climate, so it's not as cold as you might expect for Alaska, but it's plenty cloudy and wet. However, I think the cost of living there is going to eat them alive. Gas and milk are both about 5 dollars a gallon. The town is surrounded by federal forest land, which I'm sure is nice, but the lack of growing room can't be good for housing costs.



Sitka, the international city. Long dimension is about 3 miles.

Headline of the Day

Inaugural Product Placement

Apparently Jackass will be carried to his re-inauguration in a new Cadillac DTS limo. Yes, product placement has now spread to presidential inaugurals. News outlets are playing right along, dutifully reporting that the civilian non-limo version of the new Cadillac DTS will be available in a showroom near you this fall.

Un-fucking-believable.

In further insanity that undoubtedly heralds the end of civilization as we know it, Fox has decided to pixelate (ie blur) the bare rear end OF A CARTOON CHARACTER when it reruns an episode of a "Family Guy" that's five years old (and which ran unpixelated originally, without complaint). This to protect their affiliates from the Jesus freaks at the FCC, apparently.

Quantum Uncertainty

I decided to go ahead and take physical oceanography, and it looks like it's going to be a real cotton candy class. It's being taught purely descriptively, for a bunch of atmospheric science majors mostly. Math models also looks like it'll be very easy. I'm sure partial differential equations will be OK, based on the professor, whom I had for ordinary differential equations.

Electromagnetic theory will be a ton of work, but it's quantum mechanics that has me worried. It's being taught by a theoretician, and they're all pretty nuts. Class is an 80-minute uninterrupted stream of consciousness and, being a theoretical physicist, the stream of consciousness is in the form of advanced math and formula derivations. One of his big things is that we should never look up anything -- like an integral or a trig identity. Apparently theoreticians consider this to be something that only experimentalists and, worse yet, engineers and other low-lifes, need to do. According to the doc, theoreticians take pride in doing all their own math, from scratch, the same way experimentalists take pride in designing their own instruments.

Spring Semester

Class starts tomorrow. I'm taking partial differential equations, math models, electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics. Also senior seminar (one hour). I'm also considering taking a special topic course in physical oceanography, which of course will be my field in graduate school. But I don't know if I will or not, since it's not really expected that you have it on the undergrad level and I'll be plenty busy with everything else, especially if I want to get some research done. Still, I'd like to take the class.

Siamese Fatties

I was sick as a dog last night for some reason. I ate a bunch of raw carrots before bedtime, and before long wound up with full symptoms of a stomach flue. Food poisoning, I guess. Anyhow, flashbacks to my heart attack, when I threw up carrots all over the operating table during the angioplasty procedure. New Years resolution #11: stop eating carrots.

I didn't sleep at all because of it. I started to feel a little better about 9 in the morning, but by then my upstairs neighbors were up. Another problem with the Bunker, aside from the dodgy heating, is that people walking around normally upstairs sound like giants. Even the kids rattle the windows. It's like I'm living in a huge bass drum, and they're walking on top of it. So I lay there wishing I could sleep until about noon, when they finally went out, and then slept uncomfortably until about 3:30. Right now I feel hungry, but slightly queasy too.

Between runs to tbe bathroom, for some reason I started thinking of a new television show. It seems pretty clear from what the networks are putting on that people only want to see news magazines and reality shows. And what do they want to see on these shows? No, not sex and violence, unfortunately. Based on what I'm seeing it's fatties, eating gross stuff and siamese twin separations.

So for my show we'd have to find a pair of really fat siamese twins. They could only be attached at the head or something, so that they each have a separate body. They'd be put on a strict diet of bugs and blended-ups rats and so forth, and they would have to exercise and play games to lose weight. I'm not sure what obese siamese twins could actually do, but based on how they're configured it seems to me that they could at least do simultaneous rope-jumping, crab-walking, running in circles, rolling up and down hills...whatever.

While this was going on we'd have a team of crack surgeons planning their separation. Very dramatic. And once they're separated we'd weigh them, and the one that weighed the least would be the winner. He or she would get a recording contract or a job with Donald Trump or something.

Please nobody tell Mark Burnett about this idea. I just need a name.

My Fucking Landlady

Yesterday morning I'm lying in bed and my landlady, Riva, bangs on the door, gets me out of bed and starts giving me the third degree about -- of all things -- dog shit on the front lawn. I'm barely awake and this nutty shrew is grilling me about each individual turd she found that might or might not have come out of my dog. I shit you not.

Heidi goes on the front lawn sometimes, but I always clean it up if I see it, and I generally do, since I don't allow her out unsupervised. At first she claimed it was three turds, and I suppose Heidi may have been responsible for one or two, but there are other dogs in the neighborhood, and another in the building too.

Today I get a friendly building newsletter featuring the dog turd incident. (She owns one crummy little building with six units and she thinks she's Donald Trump with the newsletter and all). Apparently now the story is that the lawn was "covered" with dog shit, which she cleaned up personally. If this happens again the dogs will be evicted from the building. What the fuck ever. Personally, the only way she's going to evict my dog is to evict me, and, believe me, I will make that as expensive and unpleasant as I can for her. I should send her a copy of "Pacific Heights" so she understands the possibilities.

Religion Makes Me Sick

The more I see of religion, the more I'm convinced it's a form of mental illness. I mean this quite literally. People who are religious pretty much by definition believe that that they can speak to the invisible man that controls the universe. They should be locked up for their own protection, and ours.

This particular diatribe was prompted by an item on MSNBC. A handful of supposedly prominent religious nutjobs were for some unaccountable reason allowed to comment on the theological implications of the recent tsunami disaster.

One Anne Graham Lotz, apparently the author of something called "Visions of His Glory" makes the point that "What is interesting about this is that this tsunami did not increase death. All of those people who died were going to die anyway." I suppose if someone drowns Ms Lotz's own children some day, she'll laugh it off, since, hey, they had to die some time.

Jennifer Giroux, director of "Women Influencing the Nation" claims that the disaster is divine punishment, and actually uses the suffering to make political points on unrelated domestic issues like gay marriage. Do the entire U.S. population a big favor, Ms Giroux, and go influence some other nation. And while you're at it, eat shit.

Tim Lahaye, co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series (who knew trailer trash could read?) attempts to drum up business by implying that the end may be near. "Things are happening so rapidly today. Even unsaved secular scientists say they see no hope for this world beyond 25 or 50 years." Tim, I'm sure you must have heard this many times, but you're a fucking idiot.

The only one who isn't clearly demented is Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. He accuses Gireax of "colossal blastphemy and even more colossal arrogance."

Life in the Bunker

So after my big ten resolutions I've managed to spend the past two days mostly in front of the boob tube, or on the Internet.

I have managed to exercise. A few days ago my stepfather and I moved my giant Nordic Track treadmill out of storage and into the Bunker. It occupies what should be the the dining area in my kitchen, which sucks, but I didn't feel like I had any choice. Having it right here is the one thing that eliminates pretty much all excuses for not exercising. Most crucially, for the next three months, the weather.

Life in the Bunker is indeed cramped. I have a living room and a kitchen. The living room has a couple of chairs and a desk with my computer and a little portable television on it.

Fortunately, I have the world's largest closet, almost an extra room. I managed to put my giant dresser in there, with about 9 drawers, and my beloved Thermopedic queen-size mattress as well. (On its side, not lying flat). At night I just drag it out onto the living room floor.

It's not ideal, but it's cozy, incredibly convenient, and temporary. My only real substantive complaint is the wacky heat, which seems to go on and off at random. It's a building-wide, radiator type system over which I have no control. At least it's free (or rather is included in the rent).

When it comes to my list of resolutions, the hardest to keep will be number 9. You might think (and probably any sane person would think) that "having more fun" would be the easiest, but for some reason it really doesn't come naturally to me. There are plenty of things I enjoy doing, once I'm doing them, but that doesn't necessarily translate into motivation to get started. And even if I get the motivation I usually manage to find a reason not to do it, usually that I can't afford the time or money.