Movie Reviews

I've decided that I never have anything particularly intelligent to say about movies, so I'm going to a completely binary system for reviews. Since there are only two alternatives -- either you're going to see it or you won't -- more than one bit of information is really a waste.

The best part is that I can clear out months worth of backlog:

The Weather Man: Yes.
Flightplan: No.
Proof: Yes.
Corpse Bride: No.
The Constant Gardener: Yes.

From the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious department...

Apparently this came as news to somebody, somewhere.

George Takei, 'Trek's' Sulu: I'm gay

I have a feeling like when they announce that some old celebrity has died when I didn't even know he was still alive.

Update: Here's the .wav file mentioned in the comments. Google rocks.

Onion continued

The stories about the White House seal flap have indicated that the Onion refused to take the seal off their site. I've tried to verify this several times today, but www.theonion.com has been unavailable. This can mean one of two things:

A) The news stories have generated too much traffic for the Onion's servers to handle; or
B) The White House wasn't really "asking."

Of course if you want to send a cease and disist type letter to somebody, you have your lawyer do it. And we all know who the White House's lawyer is. It seems like she would be busier right now.

Onion flap

The White House, apparently with no other pressing business on their hands, is asking The Onion to stop using the White House seal on their web site in connection with their parody of the weekly presidential address. The headline of one such recent parody was "Bush to Appoint Someone to Run Country," which clearly needs to happen soon.

Wilma again (ho hum)

Wilma finally made it to south Florida this morning, landing as a category 3 major hurricane about 20 miles south of Ft Myers. It seemed to linger around the Yucatan forever, but once it turned east it moved lickety-split.

It's gotten to the point that anything less than a category 4 landing is boring, though. Look at the sub-headlines on cnn.com:

• Wilma trucks across Florida at hurricane force
  
• 2.2 million homes without electricity
  
• Heavy flooding reported in Florida Keys
  
• Naples man: "I saw a bunch of stuff flying by"
  
• Man in Coral Springs killed by a falling tree
  

Power outages, heavy flooding, stuff flying by, falling tree. LAME! If it doesn't involve the complete breakdown of civil order, roving gangs of murderous thugs, mass euthanasia and widespread cannibalism, what's the point of even covering it?

I love south Florida

Despite the heat and the humidity, south Florida has got to be, hands down, the coolest place in the country.

It has huge rattlesnakes. It has alligator and crocodiles. Florida panthers. The Everglades, the Keys, smugglers, and Cubans washing up on shore at Jimmy Buffet's house. A river named the Shark River, complete with actual sharks. The only coral reefs in the continental U.S., some of the nicest beaches in the world on the west coast, and Miami on the east.

A now it has giant pythons.

The other day I ran across a news item from the Miami Herald that included photos of a 13-foot Burmese Python that was found dead in the Everglades after killing and swallowing a 6-foot alligator. It didn't go down well. This reminded me of something I'd read a couple of years ago about an epic fight between the same two species observed by tourists on the Anghinga trail, a popular tourist spot, in front of a crowd of up to 200 people. The fight lasted at least 24 hours, and in that case, as well as other cases I've now researched, the gator came out on top.

The pythons have been introduced by people who got tired of keeping the giants as pets, and they've now become established and are breeding in the Everglades. They've become so common that park employees regularly run them over with lawnmowers.

Ecologically, of course, introduced species can wreak havoc. The only mitigating factor may be that Florida's ecosystem is such a basket case anyway. Even many of the species people think of as typically Floridian -- the banyan tree, the coconut palm, citrus and banana trees -- are actually non-native. There are also reproducing populations of several parrot and lizard species, including the green iguana. 35 fish species have become established, include common aquarium fish like the freshwater oscar and pacu and the saltwater orbiculate batfish. Then there's the fact that the Everglades as they exist now barely resemble the Everglades of 100 years ago, due to agriculture and the construction of flood-control canals and levees, and the current ambitious restoration effort is probably hopeless, for the most part.

The park rangers will attempt to irradicate the pythons. Good luck with that. I just hope all the crazies down there survive hurricane Wilma OK.

Popped python, Everglades. The snake is nearly broken in half, with its tail near the helicopter and mysteriously missing head toward the top (probably the result of another gator encounter, before or after death). The ingested gator's hindquarters and tail protrude to the bottom right.

Isn't it a great time to be a Jackass-hater?

As David Gergen put it today on CNN, the "wheels have come off" the Bush administration! I'm practically giddy.

Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are in bad trouble, and better yet, seem to be turning on each other with the respect to their possible criminal involvement in the Valerie Plame affair. Or at least Rove may be turning on Libby, possibly claiming that he learned Plame's identity from Libby's account of a conversation with journalist. One or both could be indicted by the end of the month.

And the GOP infighting doesn't end there. Nobody likes Jackass' weird choice of the unqualified Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, but the right-wing likes her least of all. But information has recently come to light that she supported anti-abortion laws while running for office in Texas, so the left-wing doesn't like her either. In fairness, she does have supporters. Just not among the left, the right, or people who care about her qualifications. It's hard to see how Jackass could have screwed the selection any worse. My theory is that, since Rove is busy being indicted, they're actually letting Bush run the country.

The FEMA/Katrine brouhaha is blowing up again, with FEMA's guy in New Orleans saying he sent messages to Michael Brown in Washington saying people were dying, and got no response. He described a senior FEMA staff completely out of touch with reality.

Today Tom DeLay was booked and his mugshot spread all over TV and the Internet. And of course the war is still going on and going badly, gas is still nearly $3 a gallon, and inflation looks like it's ticking upwards. Jackass' second-term domestic agenda is deader than disco.

Bush's approval rating is at a dismal 39%, which actually looks good compared to the GOP congress' 29%.

Finally, US News is reporting rumors from government officials that Cheney himself may resign in the Plame affair, and that Jackass would appoint Condoleeza Rice to replace him.

Wilma

The latest storm of the century, hurricane Wilma, has reached category 5 status off the Yucatan, and in fact is the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, measured by barometric pressure.

She is expected to make landfall in South Florida over the weekend as a category 3 or 4. The Keys are already being evacuated.

With Wilma, we are officially out of names for tropical storms in the Atlantic for 2005. Now we start on greek letters, for the first time ever, assuming there's annother one, which is a pretty safe bet since there are still six weeks left in hurricane season.

The increase in the number of storms in recent years is likely part of a natural cycles. However, it strains credulity to believe that global warming is not to blame for the incredible increase in their intensity. From 1928 to 2002 there were 23 category 5 hurricanes formed in the Atlantic basin, an average of about three per decade. We've now had three this year, and five in the past three years.

Oceanography Fun "Facts" of the Week

Oceanography fun facts of the week, as explained by students in my "Marine Sciences 012: Ocean Environments" class on their midterms:


"Waves are energy in motion using water as a median."
"Air at the equator has a lower salinity."
"The spring tides occur each month due to the sun, earth and moon lining up respectfully."
"The bonding of covalent bonds water is frozen with is stronger than the ionic bonds that bind salt to water molecules."
"Sea surface salinity is higher in subtropical areas due to the trade winds and westerlies, which bring high concentrations of ions to these areas."
"Waves that are created due to wave dispersion tend to go in more than one direction. This can interact with the surrounding tides and either intensify or decrease wave activity. The ones that intensify tend to create a more chaotic sea than is known for usual tides. This dispersion can continue, reaching more tides, adding to the madness."

Yes, indeed.

Boy do I need to sleep

I was up all night working on my fluids midterm, and I made some progress. I didn't do great, but I'm pretty sure nobody did. I didn't talk to anyone who sounded close to confident that they had even a single problem right.

Went to class today, despite feeling exhausted and very queasy. In scientific computing the prof handed back homeworks from 2 weeks ago, and there wasn't one with my name on it! Unbelievable. Apparently it's been lost, after I spent days on it. Even more incredibly, there was one homework left over with no name on it...but it wasn't mine! Somebody not enrolled in or attending the class is doing homework anonymously, looks like. If I'd been fast on my feet, instead of half asleep, I would have claimed it, because it was a perfect grade. Instead I said "nah..I never do math in pen."

This is in a class where homework sets are 48% of the final grade. The class is going to kill me.

Earlier this morning I started looking at the answer key for a midterm I'm supposed to be grading in the class I'm TA'ing. One of the questions was "The times of high tide and low tide shift _______ each day." Two of the possible answers were "forward" and "back." Because the moon revolves around the earth, tides one day happen almost an hour later than tides the preceding day. That much I knew. But for the life of me I couldn't decide whether later was "forward" or "backward." I mean if you move a meeting forward, it happens earlier. But if you move the clock forward, you're moving it to a later time. This completely blew my mind and after 20 minutes of thinking about it, I decided I was in no condition to grade a midterm. I still don't know if it's forward or back.

Such was the condition of my brain when I was finishing up fluid mechanics this morning. Scary.

I still have to get the damned things graded somehow. Class is at 2:00 tomorrow, and for some reason we want to hand them back before fall break, which starts Thursday, thank god. I plan to stay with my family in Asheville and study scientific computing.

Tomorrow afternoon is my semiannual graduate committee meeting, a meeting with my advisor and two other faculty members to talk about my plans and my progress. It should be interesting because I was starting to lose it on Sunday and sent my advisor this long rambling email about how I was probably going to flunk out, if I didn't drop out first.

Why is this news?

I looked at cnn.com today and there was an item "Former SNL comedian commits suicide." It turns out it was a guy names Charles Rocket, who was on the show for one year, a quarter of a century ago. It was the horrible first season after the original cast left.

Is the death of one of the least memorable cast members in SNL history news? Or is it news only because he killed himself? If he'd died of a heart attack would we have heard about it? He sure wasn't Chris Farley or Gilda Radner.

And the worst of it is...

And the worst of it is that for the past two days and three nights, as I've been doing nothing but suffer through homeworks and midterms, one of my housemates has been upstairs carrying on with his Swedish bikini model girlfriend, in town for a visit this week. And none too quietly, I might add, on her part.

Actually she's an environmental engineer. But she is Swedish, and she could model bikinis for me any time.

Are liking it and being good at it the same thing?

I'm still working on my fluid dynamics take-home exam, and I think I've got about 10 to 15 points partial credit (out of 100 for the exam) so far.

I'm hating it. I'm hating both fluids and scientific computing. Which is making me wonder if I'm in the right field

I've always thought that liking something and being good at it went hand in hand. Maybe I'm wrong. I've always had extremely high math aptitude, well into 99th percentile on all the standardized test scores and A's in any math course I ever put the slightest effort into (and even some that I didn't). But do I really like it?

If I'm honest, I have to say no, not especially. I like it more than most people, probably because I'm good at it, but there are a million things I'd rather be doing most days. I don't do anything particularly mathematical as recreation. I don't think of math on my own time like real mathematicians do.

So maybe liking something and being good at it aren't so closely related as I thought? What I'm beginning to suspect, and probably should have known all along, is that aptitude can carry you surprisingly far with little effort, which of course you won't put forth unless you enjoy something. But at some point, that's all she wrote.

Fluids

I finished a big scientific computing problem set last night (all except for one question) and sent it in about 11:00. It was due at midnight. I'm feeling slightly better about that class, but I'm sure the doom will return soon enough. Like maybe while studying for the midterm, week after next.

Right now I'm working on a take-home exam in fluid mechanics. We had a week to do it, but I didn't get started until today, due to the scicomp work. Right now I'm looking at a blank page and a big fat zero!

Problem 1 has to do with the rate of expansion of an exploding fireball. You get 30 points for deriving the equation that describes it, and 100 extra credit points for solving it (a hint, I'm assuming, that it can't be done).

Problem 2 has to do with rain running down a sloped roof and we're supposed to derive equations for the thickness of the layer, the pressure inside it and some other things.

Problem 3 has to do with a pulsating bubble of gas inside a liquid. We get 10 extra credit points if we include the effect of surface tension.

I Hate My Math Class

Actually, it's gone quite a bit beyond hatred. I hate it so much I can't even stand to look at it any longer. I'm quite certain I'm going to fail. If there was any way I could drop it and retain my assistantship, I would, but I can't, since it would take me below full-time status. I'm thinking of doing it anyway, because if I fail it I not only lose my assistantship but get thrown out of school altogether!

The course is "scientific computing," a subject which also goes by the name "numerical methods." It's all about how to do calculus and solve differential equations via numerical computer algorithms. No truth-and-beauty seekers need apply; it's a course for people with the souls of accountants but much higher math aptitude. I'm having trouble with it not because it's particularly challenging intellectually, at least not for a graduate-level math course. It's just a large volume of very boring material that I have trouble concentrating on.

The amazing thing is that anyone managed to stay awake thinking about this stuff for long enough to invent it. I suppose there must be people who enjoy the subject, like the guy teaching it, but they probably also enjoy masturbating while dangling from the ceiling by fish hooks attached to their nipples. Now that I think about it, some of the concepts were invented by Newton, who never married and had no known lovers. I guess we know what he was up to late at night.

Robotic Exoskeleton

My housemate Chris and I were commiserating this evening about having to grade homeworks (he's a high-school science teacher) and how not-so-bright our students are sometimes, but it turns out his students win hands down. One of his budding geniuses cited this article in a presentation about famous scientists. He even included the photo in the Powerpoint.

A Unificator at Last

By the way, I'm glad to see that Jackass has finally delivered on his campaign pledge to be a unificator, not a dividifier: nobody likes Harriet Miers!

Time Management Needed

I must really enjoy writing this blog, because I somehow keep finding time to do it, even though I'm busy as hell.

Grad school is as much work as I thought it was going to be, but in a different way. I imagined cramming every night and doing monstrous problem sets and impossible assignments. Some assignments have been bad, but mainly it's a death by a thousand cuts. There's always some stupid thing that needs doing. Always a seminar to attend, a meeting to schedule, homeworks or tests that need to be graded, research papers that need to be read (tonight's pleasure reading: "Group Velocity in Finite Difference Schemes"), etc. Individually nothing amounts to much, but in total it takes all my time.

It doesn't help that there's essentially no parking on campus, so I have to ride a bus. If I had it to do again I think I would have spent more time looking for a place within walking distance, because waiting for the bus is a big time waster.

Mainly I can't wait to be done with classes. A person my age shouldn't be taking classes anyway.