Mark's Digital Diary Archive (2004-2007)

This Blog Has Moved

2008-05-19T17:45:00.001-04:00

As of 2008, this blog has moved to markci.wordpress.com

Science In Action

2007-09-05T04:14:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure why I stopped updating this blog some time ago, and I'm not sure why I'm doing it now, except that I have insomnia and was up reading cnn.com, and on the very front page of that same publication read the following two headlines:

Men want hot women, study confirms

A team at Indiana U apparently came to this conclusion by studying 26 men and 20 women at a speed dating event in Munich Germany. Hmm...I wonder if that trip to Europe was paid out of the research grant.

Study: rock stars more likely to die young

Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University studied 1064 stars from the "rock, punk, rap, R&B, electronic and new age genres in the 'All Time Top 1,000' albums published in 2000." They came to the conclusion that a lot of rock stars die from drugs and stuff.

Headline of the Week

2007-05-24T11:49:00.000-04:00

"Shark virgin birth warning to man, expert says." -- cnn.com

Oh crap: shark Messiah???

Interesting, But Maybe I Need A First One First...

2006-12-06T15:19:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I came across this news item about a woman who made a million dollars developing land that doesn't exist in a place that exists only on a huge collection of Internet servers called Second Life. Mind you, the million dollars is a real million dollars that does exist, or at least could if she opted to cash out her assets.

I couldn't even conceive how a person would go about "developing" land, because the only, brief, experience I had with one of these virtual worlds way playing Sim City for about an hour several years ago, and as I recall what you did to "develop property" was drag your mouse around to put up a few walls, and dump some furniture inside. So I created a free account to see what in the world Second Life was, and wow. People really get into this stuff.

Essentially everything in the game has been created by users, a lot of them apparently really excellent artists, 3D designers and animators who make money selling virtual artwork, clothing, body parts, animations, vehicles, buildings, etc. There's a real economy. Developers will buy raw "land," which apparently maps to server capacity, create, say, a shopping mall on it. Then they'll sublet space to others, who may use it to sell clothing, furniture, sex toys, prettier eyeballs, etc that they've designed, or just distribute, to customers. Or they'll construct a theme park, or bar or brothel or whatever and charge people for admission or services provided.

The "virtual dollars" function almost as a real currency; you can buy or sell them in a free market with floating exchange rates.

Probably this doesn't come as news to a lot of people out there, but it was to me! What shocked me even more is that I sort of enjoyed playing it, though that may wear off with time.

Then I started thinking about the local fishing pier that they recently tore down to make room for more expensive beach condos. Several just in this area have been demolished in recent years, along with most of the lower-priced motels and campgrounds on Bogue Banks. These places served mostly people of modest income who can't afford a beach condo or a yacht, and it seems like you'll soon need to be rich to enjoy the ocean.

So I wonder if in the future only the wealthy will be able to afford "real" property and "real" experiences, whereas the rest will make do with virtual ones. On the other hand, if the virtual ones are good enough, maybe they'll be better.

Amazon Recommendations

2006-12-01T17:54:00.000-05:00

Does anybody ever get anything good recommended to them by Amazon.com? Currently it's recommending I buy Peter Jackson's King Kong Extended Edition. It was at least an hour before we even saw the monkey the first time around (as my niece put it), and it needs an extended edition?

Quote of the Week

2006-12-01T15:39:00.000-05:00

“I am not ‘running’ for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.” -- Newt Gingrich

Totally hilarious. Will somebody tell this bobble-headed nitwit his 15 minutes ended 8 years ago?

Must Sleep

2006-11-30T18:05:00.000-05:00

In my old age I seem to be developing into an insomniac, unfortunately, and right now I have it pretty bad. It's definitely stress-related, and I've always had some trouble sleeping when I'm stressed, as do most people from time to time. But this is far worse than normal.

It started Monday night, when I might have gotten an hour's worth of sleep. I lay there awake until about 4:30, then my housemate woke me up at 5:30 when she got up to do field work, and I never got back to sleep. I couldn't sleep Tuesday night either, even after a dose and a half of Sominex. I had to cancel a seminar I was supposed to give in Chapel Hill because I didn't feel like I could make the drive, or produce a coherent sentence even if I did.

So with the pressure of the seminar off, and being so sleep-starved, I thought I'd collapse easily last night. But I didn't. I did get to sleep eventually, but it wasn't until at least 3:00 AM, and I must have woken up a dozen times between then and 8:00.

If I don't sleep tonight I'm going to try and get a prescription for some Halcyon or Valium or something.

Quotes of the Week

2006-11-24T20:31:00.000-05:00

"This is not a violent death, so there is no ground for speculations of this kind.” -- weird comment from murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin about the man he had poisoned, Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko was at the time of his poisoning investigating the murder (likely on orders from Putin) of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

"I looked into his heart and I know his soul. He is a good man." -- Jackass, a few years ago, regarding Putin.

Some Exciting Research

2006-11-22T15:18:00.001-05:00

Here in coastal NC, the local shrimping industry has been hit pretty hard by cheap imported shrimp. However, we here at IMS believe we can help produce a superior low-fat American product.

My First Nor'Easter

2006-11-21T16:08:00.000-05:00

At last I can truly feel like a coastal NC resident as I am experiencing my first Nor'Easter. The wind blew like crazy all night last night. In fact, I had to sleep on the couch as the storm window in my bedroom was rattling in the wind and keeping me awake. This morning on the drive in to the lab the wind was rocking my Jeep from side to side. It's cold and it's raining and still blowing, and it's all expected to last though tomorrow night.

Academic Whack-a-Mole

2006-11-20T15:36:00.000-05:00

We've now moved into what I like to refer to as the academic whack-a-mole phase of the semester. That's when you have so many things to do that you get behind on something and spend all your time working on it, but by the time you've caught up you've fallen behind one something else, etc, etc ad nauseum.

The current mole in need of some serious whacking is a seminar I have to give next week in Chapel Hill on the fluid dynamics of copepods. I've been working on it for the better part of a month and it just doesn't seem to be coming together properly. If I do a crap job, it'll be in front of the whole department. It's one thing to stand up and teach a class for a bunch of undergraduates who don't know anything anyway, but I'm seriously stressed out about this. So much so that I didn't sleep last night, which means I can't work productively today, so that puts me another day behind!

Interesting Factoid

2006-11-19T15:46:00.000-05:00

It occcured to me earlier today that we've been in Iraq for roughly as long as we were in World War II, though with somewhat less satisfying results, mostly owing to the fact that our commander in chief is a low-grade moron.

From December 7, 1941 to August 15, 1945 is 1347 days. 1347 days from the day we invaded Iraq (March 20, 2003) turns out to be one week from today, November 26.

Note that this comparison is actually grossly unfair to FDR, since it doesn't include all the time Jackass & Co spent planning the war while pretending to try to find a diplomatic solution. The better comparison would be to start Jackass' clock off at September 11 2001, when his brain apparently seized on the idea of attacking Saddam.

This seems dubious.

2006-11-15T20:09:00.000-05:00

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
3
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Possibly interesting, but take it with a grain of salt. Apparently there are only 3 people with my name, but 2 of them were in my home room in high school.

Quote of the Week

2006-11-15T10:48:00.000-05:00

“I may not have the type of voice you like, but I can sing. You can’t take that away from me, ‘cause singing is a gift from God, and when people say I can’t sing, it’s kind of like insulting God.” -- Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas

Tired Old White Men Commission

2006-11-13T22:21:00.000-05:00

So the Iraq Commission I alluded to in my previous post that's supposed to find a way to get us out of Jackass's miserable mess, consists almost entirely of tired old white men, retreads from previous administrations. There is also a tired old black man (Vernon Jordan), plus a white woman (Sandra Day O'Connor) so tired she had to retire from a job that comes with three months vacation a year. Somehow this is supposed to be promising.

Hey dumbasses, here is a two-stop plan for getting the U.S. out of Iraq:

1) Send a bunch of airplanes in.
2) Fly everyone the fuck out.

Sitting Out 2008

2006-11-12T16:06:00.000-05:00

It looks like I'll be sitting out the 2008 election, because Russ Feingold, the only candidate worth a damn, has announced he isn't running.

Meanwhile, Jackass is looking to his daddy's friends to bail him out again, just as he did so many times in the past when he needed to dodge the draft, get financing for his little oil company, get into baseball to pick up a few easy millions after he'd run his little oil comapany into the ground, and get into politics when he couldn't think of anything else to do with his pathetic life. Daddy's Secretary of State and CIA director are now apparently going to help him out of Iraq.

Jackass Quotes of the Week

2006-11-09T02:10:00.000-05:00

"But if the Democrats were to take control, their policy is pretty clear to me: it's cut and run."—George W. Bush, Oct. 24, 2006

"The Democrats are the party of cut and run."—George W. Bush, Oct. 10, 2006

"I don't know how many members of Congress said, "Get out right now." I mean, the—candidates running for Congress and the Senate. I haven't seen that chart. I—I—some of the comments I read, well, they said, 'Well, look, we just need a different approach to make sure we succeed.' Well, you can find common ground there."—George W. Bush, Nov. 8, 2006

One more...

2006-11-08T15:07:00.000-05:00

Ex-SecDef Donald Rumsfeld!!!

It's Over

2006-11-08T10:53:00.000-05:00

Easily the most incompetent administration in modern U.S. history came to a de-facto end last night, and not a bit too soon. Jackass & Co will continue to screw up Iraq because the Democrats won't have the votes to do what should be done, which is to pull the financial plug on the whole thing. But otherwise that bunch of clowns is politically as dead as disco.

Personal favorite careers ended last night:

Ex-Sen. Rick Santorum (whoo freaking hoo!)
Ex-Sen. James Talent
Ex-Sen. George Allen
Ex-Sen. Conrad Burns
Ex-Rep. Charles Taylor (corrupt bozo from my old district around Asheville NC)
Ex-Rep. Katherine Harris

Adios, morons!

Quote of the Day:

"You have been sat here too long for any good you have done. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go." -- Oliver Cromwell, dissolving the Rump Parliament, 1653

Election Day Follies

2006-11-07T14:46:00.000-05:00

Today, if the polls are to be believed, the Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives and gain ground, but probably not control, in the Senate. As far as legislation goes I don't think it matters very much who controls the Senate, since the Democratic House will deadlock with a Republican president in any case. It will matter for judicial appointments, though.

So far the following have been reported. The governor of South Carolina was turned away at the polls because he left his voter registration card at home. A poll worker in Kentucky was arrested for trying to strangle a voter. Daggett County TX has registered 947 voters, which would pass without remark except that the county only has 943 residents. Missouri's chief of elections was asked for a photo ID when she voted, despite such a requirement having been ruled unconstitutional. The FBI is investigating deceptive or intimidating calls made to likely Democratic voters in Virginia, and widespread glitches with voting machines in Indiana, Ohio and Florida have led to delays and the use of paper ballots.

In a sign of the times, Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist at the last minute bailed out of an appearance with Jackass in Pensacola.

UFO sighting?

2006-11-02T00:02:00.000-05:00

At 6:35 this evening I was walking my dog along the shore in Atlantic Beach, between Oceanana Pier and Sportsman's Pier (sadly closed for good last week, and dark) when I heard a low rumbling sound, sort of like thunder. It wasn't that loud and sort of blended with the sound of the surf, so I didn't take immediate notice, but after a few seconds I looked toward the water.

I saw a line of four orange-ish lights, sort of like roman candles, moving mainly horizontally and a little up. They were clearly miles out over the water, and I estimated 6-8 degrees above the horizon. They lasted several seconds then faded out. Then another line of lights issued apparently from some unseen aircraft (it was already pitch black) moving in a slightly different direction. Those lasted a few seconds too. Once they faded I saw nothing more, and the sound soon died out.

I have no idea what it was, except maybe a training exercise involving military jets and live fire with tracer rounds or something. Or else we're being invaded by aliens.

It was a little spooky. Sort of a "what the hell is that?....JESUS, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT????" reaction.

Word of the Day: Peduncle

2006-10-31T16:16:00.000-05:00

Does this ever happen to you? I ran across this word this morning on cnn.com in an article about somebody trying to breed the perfect pumpkin peduncle. I didn't know what it meant, and if I had to guess I would have said it sounded like the slightly weird family member that your parents never left you alone with as a child. So I looked it up, and of course it means stalk or stem. But then this afternoon I'm in a seminar about the reproductive biology of the lionfish that have been introduced along the Atlantic coast and it was used again, relative to lionfish ovaries.

Will Someone Tell John Kerry to Shut the Hell Up?

2006-10-31T14:47:00.000-05:00

He's at it again. Not satisfied with having lost the presidential election in 2004 due to his douchebag personality, John Kerry is now trying to lose the midterm elections for the Democrats. Speaking at Pasedena City College he said "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq."

In other words, the troops are a bunch of ill-educated losers.

Can somebody please stuff this moron into a sack at least until November 8? Or indefinitely.

Update: Apparently he's decided to stuff himself into a sack, cancelling his public appearances over the next few days. Good idea John!

"One party official" is quoted by cnn.com as saying "I would be surprised if you see him welcomed out there anywhere and certainly not in a race that is meaningful."

Yet Another Update: Kerry says he was saying that Bush was the ill-educated one stuck in Iraq, not the troops. This is a plausible explanation, but I'd still rather see the guy sit the next few days out.

Quote of the Week

2006-10-17T11:07:00.000-04:00

"How shall I say this? Much of the time in the Legislature, critical-thinking skills are not necessarily needed." -- ultra-conservative Idaho GOP state legislator and nominee for U.S. Congress Bill Sali, explaining why he's still able to serve despite claiming to suffer from "brain fade" and memory loss due to a car crash.

Perfect!

2006-09-25T20:42:00.000-04:00

I can't believe how well this rice cooker worked. There was not a drop of water left, and every single grain was perfect. None dried out at the bottom or anything. The pot cleaned up with a soft sponge -- no scraping necessary.

It does take a bit longer than cooking in a pot (about an hour and a half for short-grain brown rice versus 50 minutes recommended on the package) but that's mitigated by the fact that you can set it up in advance and program it to have rice ready for you when you get home.

This will probably revolutionize my eating habits.

My Zojirushi NS-ZCC10 is here!!!

2006-09-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

No, it isn't the latest crotch rocket, it's my new 5.5 cup fuzzy logic rice cooker. Cooking white rice apparently isn't too hard, but I wouldn't know since I prefer brown, and I always have trouble with it, so I'm turning loose artificial intelligence technology on its ass. Aside from which, I really only enjoy cooking when there's either danger or expensive gadgets involved.

Come to think of it, that goes for most things. Maybe the reason I like diving is because there's plenty of both! When I obsess over cool photography gear I feel sort of materialistic and ashamed afterwards, but with dive gear I can always tell myself that I'm just investing in the best to maximize my safety.

I'll let you know how the thing cooks as soon as I try it out. I have some short-grain organic brown rice that's been waiting for this baby!

Unbelievable

2006-09-22T13:38:00.000-04:00

Apparently things have somehow gotten to the point that you have to give out your social security number to get television. That's right -- Time Warner won't install cable or Internet at the house unless I tell them my social security number. Not only that, but they want a letter of permission from the landlord to do the installation, even though the cable is already there (there's an existing cable outlet in every room, including the kitchen).

I told them to forget the whole thing. I'll make do with two fuzzy channels and Netflix. If I want Internet I'll dive five blocks to the goddamned lab. I am really sick of this cable company shit.

On the other hand...

2006-09-19T17:42:00.000-04:00

Now that I think about it, India may not be the best candidate for outsourcing the ordering of dead cow! It might work for KFC though.

AI or Outsourcing?

2006-09-19T17:25:00.000-04:00

I was talking to one of our lab techs, Tony, this afternoon about outsourcing in the software industry, and in general. He brought up something I hadn't heard of before: outsourcing the fast food ordering process to remote sites. Apparently if you pull up to certain McDonalds and other restaurants you may actually be talking to somebody hundreds or thousands of miles away. It seems to me this can only lead one place eventually: to India, which handles most computer tech support calls already.

Then I started thinking about AI applications like voice recognition. Why can't Microsoft Word hook up somebody at an Internet-based "call center" in India that will take your dictation more reliably than any AI voice recognition can. Certainly they can do better than "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all." Potentially there are quite a lot of other little functions that computers aren't good at but that even a minimally trained human could do.

Finally

2006-09-18T21:30:00.000-04:00

I finally found a long-term place to live in Morehead City. My new housemate, Jess (an intern in Pete Peterson's lab) and I moved into a house about 4 blocks from IMS on Friday. Unfortunately we don't have much in the way of furniture yet. Most of mine is in storage either here or, worse, in Asheville. Jess, having just graduated college, doesn't have much, though in some respects (kitchen stuff) she's ahead of me.

And yes, I'm living with a cute 22-year-old blond. Eat your hearts out!

The house is pretty nice, though it's older and small. It has a big den, though only one bathroom. The location is really convenient, and only a block from the sound.

I'm a little reluctant to spend money filling the house up with stuff, since I sort of think my next "house" will actually be a sailboat or trawler.

Dive #75 Indra Wreck

2006-09-14T21:09:00.000-04:00

Date: September 9, 2006
Location: Indra wreck
Boat: Midnight Express (Olympus Dive Center)
Max Depth: 68 feet
Bottom time: 40 minutes
Gas: EANx30
In: 12:05 AM Out: 12:50 AM
Buddy: Jamie R.
Visibility: 15-20 feet
Temp: 79 degrees

The Indra is a very neat wreck. Visibility was pretty poor this time, but I still managed to see one small sand tiger shark.

Dive #74 U-352 Wreck

2006-09-14T20:58:00.000-04:00

Date: September 9, 2006
Location: U-352
Boat: Midnight Express (Olympus Dive Center)
Max Depth: 111 feet
Bottom time: 16 minutes
Gas: EANx30
In: 9:12 AM Out: 9:36 AM
Buddy: Jamie R.
Visibility: 40 feet
Temp: 79 degrees

Dove on the U-352 for the first time, two days after finishing "Last Dive" (a book about a father/son team who died diving another u-boat). Visibility wasn't the best, but not too bad -- maybe a lingering effect of the tropical storm.

The wreck is very cool. Bottom time was more limited than it needed to be because my buddy had his dive computer in air mode instead of nitrox mode! Still managed to see many fish, including a 6-inch volitan lionfish. They've been introduced to local waters from the pacific, apparently courtesy of the the aquarium trade.

This was my first dive with my new backplate and harness setup, as well as my Dive Rite NiTek Plus computer. I've downloaded the profile of the dive and you can see it by clicking on the "111 feet" above.

Stabbed with a what?

2006-09-05T15:07:00.000-04:00

An interesting factoid from Wikipedia (my primary Internet source for truthiness) on the stingray species that killed Steve Irwin: it was a short-tailed stingray, or bull ray, and they can be up to 14 feet long and weigh more than 350 kg (771 lbs).

There was also a quote by documentary filmmaker Ben Cropp, who saw the tape of the incident. "It stopped and twisted and threw up its tail with the spike, and it caught him in the chest. It's a defensive thing. It's like being stabbed with a dirty cock." Hmm...either cock means something different in Australia than it does here, or there's been some vandalism.

Update: it appears the latter. The word has been changed to "dagger." From the discussion on the Wikipedia site I'm guessing that it's some sort of reference to a god-awful nutty Australian feminist who made some badly-received public comments that basically Irwin got what he deserved.

That's a beauty.

2006-09-04T11:39:00.000-04:00

Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin was killed this morning in Australia by a stingray. You had to know this guy was going to be killed by some animal at some point, but a freaking stringray??? Who ever heard of anyone being killed by a stingray?

Update: apparently marine-medic.com has:

"Stingrays often burrow under the sand in shallow water. The usual method of injury is a reflex forward whip of the tail when the `wings' are trodden on. The tail contains one or more sharp barbs, which may embed in the skin of the victim and break off, or glance across the skin causing a laceration, which may be quite deep and extensive.

The wound is usually (though not always) acutely painful. Most occur on the lower limbs but there have now been two deaths in Australia after the barb penetrated the heart. Other serious injuries have also occurred after the barb penetrated the chest or abdomen.

At least 17 fatalities from stingrays have occurred worldwide, including New Zealand, Surinam, West Atlantic, Texas, Fiji, California, Australia, and many more from a fresh-water species in Colombia. Trunk wounds cause most of the fatalities, but acute exsanguination has caused at least two, and one death occurred from tetanus complicating a lower leg wound."

I Hate This Stuff

2006-09-01T15:25:00.000-04:00

One of my major projects this summer has been, and continues to be, some analysis of data collected over the past 10 years in the Neuse River estuary. I can't really get anywhere with it. The problem is that I'm smart enough to know that what I'm doing is wrong, probably in two or three different ways, but I don't know enough to do anything about it. If I were dumber I'd be finished, because I'd have no idea how statistically dubious some of my results are. I'd be satisfied. Wrong, but satisfied. If I knew a lot more statistics I could probably fix it. But I can't. And nobody in the department seems to know much more statistics than I do, so I'd have to call in somebody from applied math or something, which would probably wind up being a whole big thing. I just want it to go away!

Ernesto

2006-09-01T10:18:00.000-04:00

Tropical storm (formerly hurricane) Enrnesto made landfall south of here at Long Beach last night around 11:30 PM, with 70 mph winds and storm surge of only 1 to 3 feet. It got really windy here, but only enough to knock down small branches, and dumped a ton of rain. Apparently there was a tornado here in Morehead City, but I'm not sure where it touched down.

Click the photo of Ernesto to get the animated version of him making landfall, from the Weather Underground.

Fun with Probability and Football

2006-08-29T21:37:00.000-04:00

I came across an item on cnn.com sports/sports illustrated: "Predict the exact NFL standings and win $1 million." At first this sounded pretty hard, but maybe not impossible. But then I started to do a little math.

Suppose we knew nothing about football and chose our standings at random. How many possible combinations are there? Each division has 4 teams, so the standings in each division can turn out 4*3*2*1=24 different ways. There are eight divisions. Therefore there are 24 raised to the 8th power possible ways the standings can turn out. That's 110,075,314,176 ways, which is more than even a math nerd like me would have guessed. 110 billion. There are only about 80 million combinations in the Powerball lottery, so the likelihood of randomly guessing the NFL standings is less than 1/1000th that of winning Powerball.

Of course our guesses wouldn't be completely random: we know a little football. Quantifying that is pretty difficult, though. Suppose for each division we knew for certain where one team would finish. This is unrealistic, obviously, because in reality we don't have 100% information on one team and none on the rest -- we have a little information on them all. Still, it seems to me to be approximately the right amount of information overall. If we're spotted that one team per division's finishing order, the number of combinations for the rest drops way down to 1,679,616. If you win $1 million for every 1,679,616 times you play, that's about 60 cents per play. If it takes you 5 minutes to fill out your picks, you're making $7.20 per hour, which is about what they pay at our nation's largest employer, Walmart, and it comes with a similar healthcare plan.

Unfortunately I clicked the link to the contest and discovered some fine print. Not only do you have to predict the standings order, but also which teams go to the playoffs and the playoff results through the Superbowl. The odds of doing that are surely many thousands to one against, so it looks like you're better off at Walmart after all.

Snake Hype

2006-08-25T12:32:00.000-04:00

I was wondering how I managed to be the only person in all of Morehead City even mildly interested in seeing Snakes on a Plane on the Saturday afternoon of its opening weekend. I had heard about all this Internet hype, but box office was disappointing across the country. It was no Blair Witch, though as a movie it was slightly less painful to sit through than Open Water.

Then it occured to me that I hadn't really heard any hype. All I'd heard was hype about the hype -- meta-hype! And now I'm wondering if there was really any hype at all. Maybe it was phony psuedo-meta-hype: the studio gets Sam Jackson to blather on in every interview about how the name of the film has created this Internet phenomenon that doesn't really exist. Given how stupid the media are, they probably bought it, though it doesn't seem to have helped put asses in the seats. Except my stupid ass.

Semester Begins

2006-08-24T15:14:00.000-04:00

I had my first class by video link with Chapel Hill this afternoon. As far as the quality of the audio-visual experience nobody is going to mistake it for IMAX, but I guess it'll work out OK. Thankfully I don't have many more classes to take. It looks like I finally got things straightened out to take the class at Duke Marine Lab too.

I have a few leads on long-term places to live out here, so it's hard to believe that one of them won't pan out soon. One of them is a two-bedroom place half a block off the beach, but I can't see the inside until Sept 1, when the current residents move out. Frankly I should probably just rent it sight unseen; it's a beach house, it costs $600 a month and I can have a dog. How bad can it be?

I can see already that classes are going to interfere with my scuba diving schedule! I got a bunch of new gear, including a dive computer that just arrived today, and want to try it out, but I think I'll have to wait until next Friday to go out. Even that's not certain, since they need 4 people to run the boat and only 3 are signed up now. It seems like it's a choice between weekends when the boats are overcrowded, assuming you can even get on, and week days, when they may not even run. I need to start putting together a group of friends who want to dive regularly large enough so that the boat operators will take us when and where we want to go.

In world news, as of today Pluto is no longer a planet. Good riddance, I say! I've long been an anti-Plutite and can remember arguing with my best friend in junior high school, Mark Gordon, that it shouldn't be considered a planet. No, as it happens I didn't get many chicks in junior high. Why do you ask?

I finally bought those hair clippers, though not from Amazon, and gave myself my first self-administered buzz cut. There was only one small problem. Normally I get a cut with a "#3 guard," which I know is 3/8 inch. However for some reason I attached the 3/16 inch guard. I pretty much knew right away that I'd screwed up, but there's no turning back on these things.

Dolphin Wrangling Denied

2006-08-21T19:46:00.000-04:00

The semester has snuck up on me! I had planned to go out dolphin wrangling* (the mammal type this time) with some folks from the NOAA lab in Beaufort on Thursday, but I realized over the weekend that classes start on Wednesday, so it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Classes this semester: seminar, estuarine processes, research hours, and hopefully a biological oceanography class at Duke Marine Lab. The processes for cross-registering for Duke classes is a little byzantine, however, and I haven't actually managed to do it yet. I'd like to go down to the registrar's office and kick some asses, but unfortunately I'm 160 miles from Chapel Hill.

* wrangling = capturing, examining, tagging, etc.

Movie Review: Snakes on a Plane

2006-08-20T18:17:00.000-04:00

I was working Saturday afternoon and wanted to take a break, so I went down the street to see the much-hyped Snakes on a Plane, which just opened. Two things:

1) The movie sucked.
2) I was the only motherf&#(ing person in the motherf@^%ing theater.

Wow, I bet they sell a lot of these.

2006-08-19T15:48:00.000-04:00

I was searching amazon.com for hair clippers so I could do my own buzz cuts (and maybe avoid surprise eyebrow trims) when I ran across this item. I'm sure it makes fascinating beach reading, but unfortunately I'm a little short of the $325.

The 2000 Import and Export Market for Shavers and Hair Clippers with Electric Motors and Parts in N. America & Caribbean (World Trade Report) (Ring-bound)

On the demand side, exporters and strategic planners approaching the market in N. America & Caribbean face a number of questions. Which countries are supplying shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts to N. America & Caribbean? What is the dollar value of these imports? How much do the imports of shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts vary from one country to another in N. America & Caribbean? Do exporters serving the market in N. America & Caribbean have similar market shares across the importing countries? On the supply side, N. America & Caribbean also sells to the international market of shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts. Which countries in N. America & Caribbean supply the most exports of shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts? Which countries are buying their exports? What is the value of these exports and which countries are the largest buyers?

This report was created for strategic planners, international marketing executives and import/export managers who are concerned with the market for shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts in N. America & Caribbean. With the globalization of this market, managers can no longer be contented with a local view...Icon Group has developed a proprietary methodology, based on macroeconomic and trade models, to estimate the market for shavers and hair clippers with electric motors and parts for those countries serving N. America & Caribbean via exports, or supplying from N. America & Caribbean via imports.

No Bull

2006-08-17T20:32:00.000-04:00

Incidentally, on the topic of sharks, Steve, the instructor at Olympus Dive Shop I've been dealing with, told me that he and another of their employees spotted a bull shark when they were cleaning some fish at their dock the other night. This is a couple of miles down the road on the same waterfront where IMS is located, where I hooked what I believed to be a shark, and where I've been swimming at night. OK, I swam there once at midnight, when we were all pretty drunk. But I won't be doing that any more. Bull sharks aren't to be messed with. I would dive with them, cautiously, in good visibility, but I'd rather not swim with them in a murky estuary like Bogue Sound.

Update: apparently somebody actually landed a good-size bull shark on the Morehead City waterfront a couple of days ago.

More Scuba

2006-08-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

I took off again yesterday to go diving and get my Nitrox certification (academic employment rocks). We initially went out the the Caribsea, a cargo ship torpedoed during WWII and well known as the residence of a group of sand tiger sharks, but visibility was poor, so we moved to the W.E. Hutton, also sunk by a U-boat. It was a pretty nice dive, shallower than the Caribsea, decent visibility, 30+ feet. Among other things we saw a couple of 6-foot sandbar sharks, one of which surprised me (and I him) when neither of us saw the other until we were just about in touching distance. They were very cool, though. Very active, fast-swimming sharks, unlike sand tigers, which just sort of hang out.

For our second dive we went back to the Indra. Visibility was good, 40 feet maybe. Much better than Friday, and we penetrated a very small distance into the wreck, swimming down through some large portholes into the lower deck.

I ordered a bunch of dive gear and it arrived today (actually early from UPS -- will wonders never cease??) I need to schedule another dive to check it out. I still need to buy a dive computer and a wet suit.

Scuba

2006-08-14T13:54:00.000-04:00

I took off Friday and went scuba diving for the first time in years. We went to the Indra, a ship that was sunk deliberately in 70 feet of water as part of the artificial reef program. It was a fairly unremarkable dive, but I had nearly forgotten how much fun diving was. I was so excited that I immediately signed up for a Nitrox diving class so that I can have more bottom time on the many deep wreck sites in the area. I had the classroom session and written exam Saturday, and Wednesday I'm going out for my first Nitrox dives. This is going to cost me a lot of money, since I have a lot of equipment that needs replacing.

Things have cooled off a lot, starting Saturday; yesterday and today have been just beautiful. I'm sure it will get hot again, but the cooling, combined with the fact that the undergraduate summer employees and students have just left, has created a premature but distinct and slightly melancholy feeling of the end of summer around here.

Goodbye to Jenessa, Trevor, Haley and the rest -- it was fun!

Hair today, more tomorrow.

2006-08-08T16:24:00.001-04:00

I got a haircut today, and right in the middle of it, without so much as a how-do-you-do, this nutty hair cutter sticks a comb in my right eyebrow and runs the clipper over it, giving me my first eyebrow trim. Not only have I never been offered one (well, I guess I still haven't actually been "offered"), I've never even heard of it before.

Am I starting to get gross, old-man long hairs in my old age? You be the judge:

Wurmsorge

2006-08-07T11:34:00.000-04:00

Just about the only thing I remember from my single semester of college German is that when you use a noun as an adjective to modify another noun (is there a name for this grammatical construct?) you squash the nouns together into a single word. In German you have a kitchencabinet. This can go on indefinitely: kitchencabinetdoorhandle. That's where words like schadenfreude come from.

So with (appropriately enough) Babel Fish's help I've invented a word for the feeling you get while fishing that you may have lost your bait: Wurmsorge, which as far as I can tell is the best translation for "worm worry."

Night Fishing

2006-08-07T11:22:00.000-04:00

I went fishing last night with the visiting undergraduates, just off the pier here at IMS. I caught a little black drum, maybe 2 pounds. On the very last cast of the evening I hooked some sort of monster, almost certainly a shark, which took line off my reel and eventually broke me off. I never did get a look at it. I don't think I'll be doing any more midnight swimming out there for a while.

I've decided that there should be a word for the feeling you get while fishing that you may no longer have bait on your hook. Maybe a German word like schadenfreude or fahrvergnugen.

Busy Week

2006-07-22T12:24:00.000-04:00

Things were pretty busy this week, with plenty of field work. On Monday we ran out to the instument platform in the Neuse River estuary to maintain some of the instruments. I hate the Neuse. It stinks. It's full of pig shit.

Pigs and tobacco are the two main agricultural products of eastern North Carolina, and while I'm not sure which is worse for your health, I do know which smells worse when you drive by. When hurricanes flooded the region in '99 there were pig carcasses floating in streams of pig shit running thoughout the towns.

On Tuesday Tony and I went out to the Lookout Shoals buoy, which is about 27 miles offshore. He's trying to get radio communications going for the current and wave data it's supposed to be sending back, but still isn't, and I was along as a second set of hands. It was a very calm day and the water was really beautiful -- crystal clear.

So we're out there in the middle of nowhere with no land in sight on only one or two boats as specks on the horizon and all of a sudden, with no warning at all out of the clear blue skies KA-BOOM!!!! It was a defeaning sound like a lightning strike very close, but there was no flash of light. I was on deck and Tony came running out of the cabin yelling WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? I looked up, since there was no place else to look, and saw the faint vapor trail of a jet at very high altitude. The aircraft itself was too high to see. Apparently it was a sonic boom, from one of the Marine Corps jets from the air station nearby. About a minute later there was a double BOOM-BOOM, and this time we could see no plane, but they were up there because occasionally another thread-thin vapor trail would show up on a weird looping trajectory. I guess they were practicing dogfighting.

Wednesday I worked in the lab, but Thursday we were back at the buoy running some tests for unexpected problems we found on Tuesday. This time we took along snorkle gear to look at the fish schooling under the buoy. Visibility was 50-60 feet. We should have taken fishing gear, since there were several dolphin (the fish type) feeding on the little fish!

Friday I had to make a quick run to Chapel Hill and back for a doctor's appointment. Everything checked out OK.

I've just about decided to go ahead and buy a sailboat and live on it rather than waiting and renting a place for a year. Currently the model I'm most interested in is a Southern Cross 31, which is not too expensive (used), very cool-looking, roomy enough to live in, and a very capable blue-water boat as well.

Portuguese Man of War

2006-07-04T22:43:00.000-04:00

Portuguese Man of War
Originally uploaded by Mark Ciccarello.

Here's another Man o' War I found this evening. But I only saw one, and on a much longer walk (~5 miles) than last night.

Man o' Wars

2006-07-03T22:51:00.000-04:00

On a short (2 mile round trip) beach walk this evening I found 3 freshly washed up portuguese man o' wars. They're apparently not uncommon around here during prevailing onshore winds, but three is two more than I've seen on any one walk previously. Add the one I saw on my run yesterday, and I'm not sure I'd want to be in the water right now.

They're very cool-looking animals (colonies of animals, actually), and about as alien a life form as anything I can imagine, but I don't want to meet up with one in the water. A few years back a scuba diver was killed on one of the local wreck dives by one; I guess he went into cardiac arrest. There's no great place to have a heart attack, but underwater is definitely sub-optimal. Our boat captain, Joe, once managed to get a few stray tentacles off a wet suit onto his face and he said it was like someone had thrown a pan of hot grease in his face.

Runnin'

2006-07-03T10:35:00.000-04:00

OK, forget what I said last time about switching from running to swimming. I've thought of a new long-term goal: to run Bogue Bank on the beach from inlet to inlet, which would be over 24 miles. I'm going to have to work up to this! I think it can be done, even though running on sand definitely seems to be more work than running on pavement. I've even started to think of some of the details, like that I should run from the southwest end of the island to the northeast so I'm running with prevailing winds. It'll probably take me 5 hours, so it's not something I can do at low tide, though I can avoid a high tide, and certainly a spring high tide, so I'll have room to run on compacted damp sand without getting my shoes wet.

Swimmin'

2006-06-25T18:00:00.000-04:00

Since I arrived I've been trying to get into a regular workout schedule. There's a health club down the road that's not too bad, and has a good student discount, so I've joined that. I think I've decided that mainly I'll be alternating between Nautilus workouts (done quickly so that there's an aerobic benefit) and swimming. I still plan to run now and then, but I'll probably wind it down because it's a little bit boring and pretty high-impact too.

I'm going to need to learn to swim quite a lot better. That may sound strange for an oceanographer who's a certified SCUBA diver and who grew up in Florida, but true nevertheless. I have problems with form, finding a pace and breathing properly.

I never took swimming lessons as a kid, and the swimming I did was mostly in backyard pools, too small to swim laps in. When I went to Georgia Tech I took "drownproofing" (a requirement for graduation at the time). I'm glad I did, but at the time I wasn't so happy about it. To pass it you had to do things like remain at the deep end of the pool with your hands tied behind your back and a 10-pound brick hanging around your neck for an entire class period. The techniques may save my life some day, but they did nothing for my swimming form, since we didn't do any real swimming.

I'm currently nursing a bit of a sunburn. I was tired of my farmer tan, so I went walking on the beach Saturday with the intention of getting a little protective base tan on my upper body. I overdid it a little and am a little pink -- not too bad. But it's definitely going to peel.

Morehead

2006-05-23T09:18:00.000-04:00

I drove to Morehead City yesterday to meet with my advisor Rick, and find a place to live. So far no luck on finding a place, and I'm staying in the bunkhouse.

Rick and I talked a good bit about what would be a good research area for me, and it looks like I may work on storm surge, and in particular the effects of wetland vegetation on it. We have computer models that can predict storm surge fairly well, but there are indications that they don't get wetland effects right. It's known that wetlands act as buffers against storm surge, but the statistics out there in the media (e.g. that 2.7 miles of marsh reduce storm surge by one foot) are more or less rectally produced.

If this winds up being my dissertation work, it'll sort of be cool. My very first day of graduate school, August 29, was the day the levee broke in New Orleans. The wetlands around New Orleans had been largely destroyed by development.

Brain Fried

2006-05-04T21:47:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is my 2.5 hour presentation from hell. I'm not really ready, and am having a hard time getting ready because my brain is fried. This morning I had to listen to my friend Elaine's presentation, which ran over: 3 hours and 40 minutes. I'm not kidding. We did take a 10-minute break. That pretty much cooked me mentally, but then I had to spend several hours this afternoon and evening grading final exams for oceanography 101.

I have another prospect for a place to live in Morehead, but I won't be able to get down there again until next Wednesday, when things will be all wrapped up here. After tomorrow all I'll have left to do is read a paper for small-scale physics on Monday and take the geo final on Tuesday, so I should be able to relax some this weekend.

Nearing the end

2006-04-26T23:12:00.000-04:00

The semester is approaching the end, and none too soon. I'm tired as hell of taking classes and can't wait to get out of here.

Unfortunately I still haven't found a place to live. I haven't been working too hard at it recently, since I've had too much work to finish up.

I still have to do a 2.5 hour (!!!) presentation in geophysical fluid dynamics as my "final exam," which is just crazy. It's on the subject of western boundary current intensification, the name for the fact that the various oceanic gyres are swifter, narrower and deeper on the western boundary of the ocean basins (e.g. the Gulf Stream), and wider, shallower and slower on the eastern side. The physics of why this is so is non-obvious enough that it was totally unexplained until about 1948. Nevertheless, I'm going to have to bring some no-doze for the audience.

Recent Doings

2006-03-26T17:09:00.000-05:00

I drove down to the coast yesterday to see a room for rent in a fairly large house in Beaufort owned by a Duke Ph.D. It was the downstairs master suite, which would have given me a good amount of room, but I sort of wish there were better arrangements for my dog. No fenced yard, and the dog wouldn't be allowed in the living room because she weirdly thinks the claws are going to scratch the hardwood floors. I think maybe I'll keep looking, but I need to find something reasonably soon. I would have spent more time visiting the beach while I was down there, but the weather sort of sucked, so I more or less turned around and came back.

I've just about had it with college basketball. The fact that the Tarheels lost early in the tournament doesn't seem to have dampened my housemates' enthusiasm for watching, in part because they want to see how their brackets turn out, and in part because the women's team is still alive, and in part because they just love this stuff. I couldn't care less. I know I'm at the wrong school, because basketball seems to me like something you do with your time in the winter when it's too cold to go outside and play a real sport like football or baseball.

I went to play putt-putt, which I haven't done in years, with one of my housemates, his girlfriend and some of their friends, but it was closed. The driving range was open, though, so we hit a some buckets of balls. This was the first time I'd ever hit a golf ball with anything but a putter, except one time as a kid I barely remember, but I did pretty well. I mostly used a six iron and most of my shots went 150 yards or so, and straight as an arrow. I even managed to hit the little tractor thingy running around out there collecting balls near the 150 yard marker, and on purpose. There were some mishits too, of course. It was fun, so now I'm thinking I should take up golf. It would give me one more thing to do down at the coast, though it isn't cheap, of course. I've sort of always wanted to try it, but somehow never got around to it.

Terrorist incident

2006-03-04T10:40:00.000-05:00

Some looney-tune Muslim drove through "the pit," a plaza between the student center, a dining hall and the bookstore, yesterday a little after noon. He was deliberately trying to run people over, but fortunately he didn't kill any of them, though six of them wound up in the hospital. Reportedly he said he did it to avenge the treatment of Muslims, which of course means the FBI got involved and it made the national news.

I was on campus, but in class and didn't see any of it. This is less than a week after two students fell out a third-story dorm window, one of them to his death. Apparently they were horsing around, racing through the hall, though it's hard to see how that results in them going through a window.

Morehead City

2006-03-01T22:34:00.000-05:00

I'm getting more and more anxious to get out of Chapel Hill and back to the Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. That'll happen in May, after I finish the semester. In part it's because I'm anxious to get started on some field work again, and partly because I feel a need to settle down somewhere, for at least a few years.

Unfortunately, Morehead City has been described as the "black hole of dating" by other grad students. Most of the complaints I've heard have come from women, though. I think it's worse for them, because there are more girls than guys at the various labs (UNC, Duke, NCSU, NOAA) and women are, perhaps stereotypically, more concerned with dating someone of the same or better educational and socio-economic status, and in such a small town there just aren't that many options.

My advisor is heavily involved with NOAA and the government in figuring out what happened with Katrina, and preventing it from happening again. Our lab is doing much of the storm surge modeling work, and I expect I'll get pulled into that in the summer, which could be fun. I'm not sure it'll lead to my own dissertation, though, because I don't really think that's what I want to do.

Olympics

2006-02-18T14:43:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago I thought of posting something about why I hate the Winter Olympics, aside from the fact that so many of the events are incredibly lame. The reason: that they're so white. Nobody but rich white Americans and Europeans play any of these sports. Major countries, like Mexico, don't even bother to field teams. It's fun to poke fun at the Jamaican bobsledding team, of course, but drawing from such a limited demographic means that these athletes just aren't as good as those in many of the summer events. What did Hans and Frans call them? The girlie olympics or the baby olympics or something.

I wish I'd posted it then, though, because something happened today that only amplifies my point: a speed skater by the name of Shani Davis of the U.S. team became the first black person ever to win an individual gold medal at the winter games.

iPod Quirk

2006-02-08T18:51:00.000-05:00

I can't seem to get the iPod to "cross-fade" songs into one another like iTunes does on my PC. I checked the "iPod options" for it via iTunes and it's set (as it apparently comes from the factory) at six seconds, but it's not doing it. Anybody have any suggestions (Dave?).

Hmm, it looks like a lot of the options under "iPod options" aren't for the iPod at all, but rather for iTunes, despite being accessed by right-clicking my iPod option and clicking "iPod options." That's fucked up.

Super Lame

2006-02-08T18:10:00.000-05:00

XL apparently stood for Xtra Lame. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves, including the Rolling Stones.

A few recent iTunes downloads:

Grateful Dead: Uncle John's Band
Lou Reed: Walk on the Wild Side
Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Stevie Wonder: Superstition
Ringo Starr: Photograph
ELO: Living Thing
Bowie: Rebel Rebel, Fame, Modern Love
The Youngbloods: Get Together
Peter Tosh (with M. Jagger): Don't Look Back

So far I've downloaded 69 songs all together, and I'm starting to run out. Apart from iTunes downloads there are quite a few physical CD's of my very favorites I need to buy, many of them to replace stuff I've managed to lose over the years and other to have more complete coverage. People like Van Morrison, Warren Zevon, Paul Simon, the Clash, the Pogues, Dylan, The Band, Little Feat and a bunch of others. In some other cases I think I'm forced to buy CD's just because some things aren't on iTunes.

Super Bowl

2006-02-03T18:32:00.000-05:00

Sunday is the Super Bowl. At first I wasn't sure who to root for, but I'm going to have to go with the Steelers. The reasons:

1. I sort of have the impression that Paul Allen is a douchebag.
2. In addition to the Seahawks, he owns my former-and-never-again cable TV provider, Charter Communications, which as a company is definitely a douchebag.
3. If Seattle loses, the people there are still living in a nice city. People from Pittsburgh don't have much else.
4. It doesn't get very cold in Seattle, and only drizzles lightly, but the latte-swilling weenies who pass for football fans there need a stadium with a high-tech cantalevered roof that covers the seats. Pittsburgh has horrible winter weather, but the fans sit out in the open, as the good lord intended.
5. I'm a Dolphins fan, so I generally favor the AFC.
6. I think the Steelers are going to win anyway.

Yet again, you heard it here first

2006-02-02T18:25:00.000-05:00

Once again, as with the New Orleans levee break, markci.com is your source for future news. This from cnn.com today:

Lawsuit: iPods may cause ... eh?

Man claims decibel levels, earphones contribute to hearing loss

Thursday, February 2, 2006; Posted: 2:26 p.m. EST (19:26 GMT)

A California lawsuit filed Tuesday states that Apple's iPod players can cause hearing loss.

Apple has sold more than 42 million of the devices since they went on sale in 2001, including 14 million in the fourth quarter last year. The devices can produce sounds of more than 115 decibels, a volume that can damage the hearing of a person exposed to the sound for more than 28 seconds per day, according to the complaint.

The iPod players are "inherently defective in design and are not sufficiently adorned with adequate warnings regarding the likelihood of hearing loss," according to the complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, on behalf of John Kiel Patterson, of Louisiana.

Interestingly, the guy isn't claiming he actually has hearing damage, only that Apple sold him a device that makes damage possible. Another tidbit: Apple was forced to pull iPods off the shelves in France in order to limit volumes to 100 dB, which they haven't done in the U.S.

Dave, you may want read the fine print on any future iPod software updates carefully.

Classes

2006-01-30T11:15:00.000-05:00

I have three classes this semester:

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics -- this is fluid dynamics as applied to the ocean and atmosphere -- the physics of a thin layer of stratified fluid in a rotating reference frame.

Geological Oceanography -- this is the geology of the ocean basins -- plate tectonics, sediments, all sorts of stuff. It's being taught by an emeritus faculty who has witnessed continental drift personally. Mostly the lectures are him telling his life story. He did an amazing number of things, but I'm not sure I'm learning anything.

Small Scale Physics -- this one is so far mostly about turbulence and mixing, and it scares me. Usually it takes about three weeks for me to get lost in a physics class, even an upper-level one, but I was pretty much lost fifteen minutes into the first lecture, on the generation of entropy in a binary fluid.

Even the professor is struggling a little with this material, which is a hopeful sign. I've had professors struggle with material before, but it's always been because they were incompetent. A competent instructor struggling to teach me something new is the first hint that I may soon know enough to do something useful, I think.

oh, and...

2006-01-25T20:38:00.000-05:00

Oh, and Carly Simon's "You're so Vain," which has always been a personal favorite, though I've never owned a copy. Sound quality of this compressed stuff must be pretty good, actually. I've never been able to tell what she whispers at the beginning on the radio (probably in part because some dumb-ass DJ usually talks over it) but on the headphones it's very clearly "son of a gun."

More iPod downloads

2006-01-25T20:15:00.000-05:00

I bought some mechanical pencils today with 2 unique features: they were anti-bacterial and they came with a free iTunes download. Since I got one for free I downloaded a bunch more.

The Mama's & the Pappas: California Dreamin'
Otis Redding: Dock of the Bay
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Under the Bridge
Rush: Tom Sawyer, Limelight (I don't particularly like Rush, but Neil Peart's drumming has a hypnotic effect on me. I think he may be an alien.)
Stealers Wheels: Stuck in the Middle with You (did they have another song?)
Blind Melon: No Rain
The Presidents of the United States of America: Lump
No Doubt: Hey Baby, Hella Good
Goo Goo Dolls: Give a Little Bit (not sure why I didn't just get the Supertramp version)
Sheryl Crow: All I Wanna Do, Soak Up the Sun, Everyday is a Winding Road (for my guilty pleasure mix)
Roxy Music: Avalon (Dave's suggestion)

iPod

2006-01-23T22:32:00.000-05:00

After a week I've decided I really like my iPod. It has a few quirks (like that my computer will not boot with it attached!) but overall a very well-done product.

I've started using the iTunes store, which is convenient and addictive. I don't think I'll ever use them to buy whole albums -- I'd rather buy an actual CD so I get an uncompressed version -- but for individual songs it's great. There are a lot of groups out there who have had one or two or three songs I like, and it's much cheaper to buy them individually than on a best-of compilation.

Recent iTunes Store downloads:

CCR: Born on the Bayou (their best song, but weirdly not on their best-of album)
ZZ Top: La Grange (how how how how)
Gladys Knight: Midnight Train to Georgia (I know the whole Pips part by heart)
The Hollies: Long Cool Woman
ELO: Mr Blue Sky
Elvis: Promised Land, Suspicious Minds, Kentucky Rain (late Elvis is underrated: James Burton rocks)
Little Feat: Dixie Chicken
Queen: Crazy Little Thing Called Love
Blondie: Heart of Glass (long version)
Aerosmith: Sweet Emotion (one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time, but I had to settle for a live version since iTunes' selection sort of sucks)
Bangels: Hazy Shade of Winter, Walk Like an Egyptian
Roxy Music: More than This. (I've had this song in my head on and off since I saw Lost in Translation TWO YEARS AGO)
The Romantics: What I Like About You

Another thing I'm wondering about is possible hearing damage. Every time I listen to the thing at anywhere near full volume my ears ring afterwards. But I'm sure there are millions of people listening to them at full volume all day long. Either it's safe to do, or Apple has a potentially huge liability problem on their hands.

Spring Semester

2006-01-16T17:26:00.000-05:00

Spring semester is a little slow getting started. My Wednesday class was cancelled, then I had classes on Thursday. Buy I have none of Friday, and today was a holiday. So tomorrow will be only my second day of classes.

I've decided to drop the seminar. I don't think I'm going to have to time to prepare one, given that two of my three classes are in physics, so will be a huge amount of work.

I can't believe how slack UNC is about collecting tuition and fees. My previous schools would drop your schedule like a hot potato if you weren't paid up by the first day of classes. My assistantship pays my tuition for me, but I still need to pay fees, and last semester I think it was the middle of October, at least, until I got around to doing it. The main reason was that they couldn't seem to get together an accurate bill; they could never get my assistantship funds applied to it.

What really sucks is that I'll have to continue to pay fees once I move to the lab on the coast, even though I won't have access to any of the facilities that the fees are meant to pay for. Not that I get $700 per semester worth of use out of them anyway. I think the student government is out of control. It would be enough to make me a Republican, if it weren't for the fact that Republicans are a bunch of frauds who spend even more money than Democrats.

I finally broke down and bought myself an iPod Friday night, and have spent most of the weekend converting my CD's. It's a white 4 GB nano, and I mainly got it so I could have music with me when I work out (mainly running), which I'm doing again. It's not enough space to take my whole collection with me, obviously, so I may get a full-size one eventually too. But for now I wanted something solid-state, because hard drives aren't known for shock-resistance.

One thing I've discovered through this process is that I'm damned tired of just about everything in my collection. Time for a music-buying binge, I guess.

Last night my housemate Chris came home and apparently turned on his computer. Suddenly I noticed "Chris's Music" on my iTunes menu. Turns out he's got 9000+ songs there for the taking, if I weren't concerned about copyright infringement.

Zeta

2006-01-07T10:33:00.000-05:00

Tropical storm Zeta fell apart yesterday in the open Atlantic, finally ending the 2005 season that was supposed to have ended Nov 30. It turns out Dave F. wins the pool, guessing correctly the name of the final storm back in October. He gets the same thing I got for winning my fantasy football league: diddly squat. Don't spend it all in one place, Dave.

I took a road trip last week, stopping by and seeing Dave and Laura in Athens for a couple of days, swinging by Atlanta briefly, then heading to Charleston, SC. I had planned to take some photos, but didn't feel particularly inspired, so I mainly walked around the city, looking at historic stuff and eating low-country food (shrimp and grits, she-crab soup). I'm back in Asheville now, will head over to see my sister's family today, then head back to Chapel Hill tomorrow. Classes start Wednesday.

Classes this semester: geological oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, small-scale physics, seminar. It looks like geo and GFD will be on Tuesdays and Thurdays, small-scale on Monday and Wednesday, and the seminar on Wednesday, giving me Fridays off. At least assuming I don't get a TA assignment for Friday, which is a possibility.

What the hell is going on at the Naval Observatory?

2005-12-28T17:59:00.000-05:00

Maurene Dowd's column in the New York Times pointed out that on Google Earth, the Naval Observatory, residence of the Vice President, is shown as a blurry blob. Apparently this used to be true of a lot of buildings in DC, but Google found alternate sources for images of the White House and other buildings, which are perfectly clear. Only the Naval Observatory remains a pixelated blur.

I went to Google Earth and to verify this, and also noted that they don't even tell you the address. If you type in "Naval Observatory" it takes you to some generic DC location. You have to follow Massachusetts Avenue northwest from Dupont Circle to the giant circular blob which is the observatory grounds. (I used to take walks up to the observatory when I worked on Dupont Circle, so it's a familiar route).

Not only that, but MSN's virtual earth shows the same blob!

I'm guessing that they've installed some sort of anti-aircraft facilities there and they don't want them seen.

My other conclusion is that MSN Virtual Earth, comparatively speaking, sucks bigtime! I had to download software for Google Earth, but it's so much slicker, I don't mind.

TD #2

2005-12-26T22:07:00.000-05:00

Brady just tossed another TD, and I win the league!

Things were looking pretty bleak for me yesterday. I was down by 30 points, with only my defense and QB left to play. Fortunately I have the Chicago D, the most valuable "player" in the league and a total rock. They got me 19 points yesterday against Green Bay, so I knew I had a chance.

Sadly, tonight is the end of Monday Night Football on ABC. I grew up with it. I remember so many great games, many of them Dolphin games. The Dolphins are my favorite team (the first year I watched football as a child, living in Florida, was 1972, when they went undefeated) and they have played on MNF 70 times, which is more than any other team. Only the Cowboys are close, with 66.

I found out that John Lennon had died from Howard Cosell, during a Dolphins-Patriots game. I saw the famous game in 1986 where the Dolphins beat the then-undefeated Chicago Bears to ruin their perfect season. (A lot of other people did too -- it was the highest-rated regular-season game of all time). I saw Redskins QB Joe Theismann get his leg snapped like a twig by Lawrence Taylor of the Giants.

I guess I can get used to watching it on ESPN.

TD #1

2005-12-26T21:22:00.000-05:00

Brady just threw a TD pass on New England's opening drive, with about five and a half minutes left in the first quarter.

A Merry Christmas

2005-12-26T20:38:00.000-05:00

Despite all the pain, things worked out very well for me grade-wise. Better than I expected, or probably deserved.

I had to stick around Chapel Hill the weekend following finals to grade term papers and finals for Marine Sciences 12, two fairly miserable tasks. By the end of grading the final exams I was starting to hallucinate. The professor is not a big believer in multiple choice; there was a multiple choice section, but also 15 short essay questions. Times 30+ exams and that's nearly 500 short essay answers I had to read, most of them horrible and many illegible. But even that wasn't bad compared to the term papers.

It's sort of alarming. UNC Chapel Hill is consistently rated among the top 5 public universities in the United States. It's listed as "most competitive" in the college guides, so short of the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford or Duke, you don't really get a more elite undergraduate student body, but you wouldn't know it from reading these papers and exams. Despite clear instructions to base the papers on primary and secondary scientific literature, one of the students had as his main references "Sport Fishing" and "Marlin" magazines. Another discussed Atlantis, based on some looney new-age books. A third seriously discussed the possibility that dolphins are more intelligent than people. You have to allow for the fact that this is a general elective course, and 80% of the people in it are not science majors, but still.

Christmas was fine. I've been at my parents' house in Asheville, but once again for Christmas Eve I went to my sister's, stayed up late and helped wrap the gifts for the kids. I scored some clothes, CD's, a book of photography ("Magnum Ireland") I wanted, and some cash from the parents, so that was cool.

I don't think I've mentioned this in the blog, but this fall I've been in the Institute of Marine Science's fantasy football league, my first fantasy sports experience. I've done pretty well. I finished the regular season in first place and have made it to the final game. I'm currently 11 points down in the game. All my opponent's players have played, and I have only Tom Brady left, who is playing tonight. The way the scoring is done, it comes down to whether or not Brady throws 2 TD passes or not. If he does, I win the championship. Unfortunately, nobody got around to collect the money from everyone, so there's only pride involved. If I win, I think I'll retire from fantasy sports with a perfect record.

Long Time No Post

2005-12-07T12:12:00.000-05:00

It's been quite a while since I posted anything, so a brief update is in order.

I've been studying. We're coming down to the wire -- finals are next week -- and I'm trying to get things wrapped up. For fluids and physical oceanography, all my work is done except studying for finals. For Scientific Computing, on the other hand, I still have tons to do (imagine my surprise). In particular we're supposed to do a write-up on a couple of important papers of our choice in applied math. We have to do both forward and backward literature searches and summarize all that too.

So one of the papers I'm doing ("Group Velocity in Finite Difference Schemes")is old (1982) and all the papers it references are older (obviously, the author not being psychic). That means none of them are in electronic form, and I have to physically hunt them down. That might not be too bad, except that UNC subscribes to the theory that if one library is good, a dozen would be better. Despite having three main libraries (the main main one, Davis, 8 stories and also known as the graduate library; the undergraduate library; and the old main library, Wilson, mostly used for historical archives these days) nearly everything I'm looking for is spread among other, smaller libraries, namely the math/physics library, the geosciences library and the chemistry library. So today is a day to expend shoe leather.

On top of that, I have another homework set in SciComp due tomorrow, and yet another due next week, finals week. Incredibly, the second one is a double set, worth 8% of my final grade. This instructor justitifies this attrocity by claiming that it's review for the final. Thanks!

I may have to clean house

2005-11-16T10:32:00.000-05:00

Not my actual house (though it could definitely use it) but this blog! I ran across this article, which also references this article, which taken together seem to indicate that maintaining a blog isn't especially healthy for one's career, whether academic or in industry.

I googled myself and found that, sure enough, this blog has become the #1 result for my name. However, there are other people with my name in the results. I did not, for example, contribute information about Shrek 2 to moviemistakes.com, nor am I a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. I don't have a wife named Brenda, or a son named Jordan, recently a confirmand at Temple Emanuel El in University Heights, Ohio. I'm not an authorized dealer in Annalee collectible dolls. I didn't catch a 13-pound cabezon on a party boat in August, nor have I ever been a noted egyptologist.

I haven't applied for a job anyplace where I wasn't pretty much already known since relatively early in the history of the web, so I have to wonder just how common google searches are in that process. And how do the people doing them know they've found the right person? Clearly some names are so common that web searches would be pointless. Other people have very unusual names for which a search would work quite well. Mine apparently seems rarer than it is.

I'd think it would be very difficult to use web search results in most cases, though blogs might be a different story. People often post enough personal information to their blogs to uniquely identify them -- and certainly I have!

I'm tired

2005-11-15T23:52:00.000-05:00

After taking most of the weekend off to sleep, things have gotten hot and heavy again. My two big projects right now are a homework set for scientific computing and a paper for physical oceanography. The homework set is a complete bitch. For the term paper, I chose to summarize some research on sea ice melt in the Antarctic. I never knew sea ice could be such a complicated topic, but after reading about 15 papers on it, I realize that I know nothing.

Why is this news? Paris Hilton edition...

2005-11-10T09:41:00.000-05:00

On cnn.com this morning, I learned that Paris Hilton "escaped unharmed" from a car wreck. Surely she must have been pried free of the tangled wreckage using the jaws of life, seconds before the vehicle exploded into a fireball? Nah, she was riding in somebody's Bentley and they rear-ended a truck. It "scratched the hood of the car." So not even a fender-bender. A hood-scratcher. Glad we're up-to-date on that.

It was on the front page of cnn.com, and not even in the "Entertainment" section, but in the "U.S." section. I'm living in a nation of morons.

Next up: Paris' dry-cleaner ruins a really nice sweater. The shocking footage at 11:00.

Bullet dodged

2005-11-03T16:58:00.000-05:00

I didn't do particularly well on the exam, but I didn't turn in a blank piece of paper, or otherwise look like an idiot either. It helps that it was a very difficult, lengthy test. I don't know why Dr Math Genius hasn't figured this out, but when professors give tests like that, they lose resolution; it's hard to tell the good students from the dummies when the high grade is around 50%. Not much dynamic range, as we say in the photography biz, which I'm not in.

My nightmare scenario was that it would be a relatively straightforward exam, covering the material I'd studied least. Given my fatigued mental state, that could have made me look really bad.

So the net is that my career is safe, at least until finals. I've already informed Jamba Juice that I'm turning in my smoothie apron.

The other problem with insulated travel mugs...

2005-11-03T11:02:00.000-05:00

...turns out to be that they do too good a job. This damn coffee has been sitting here nearly two hours and it's still too hot to do more than slowly sip. I needs me some caffeine! You'd think someone with training in thermodynamics would have a handle on this stuff...

T minus 4.5 hours

2005-11-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

I was pretty much toasted mentally by the time I posted last night, and I wound up trying to go to bed around 11:00. The plan was to get a good night's sleep and get up early to start studying again when I was fresh. Unfortunately, as I feared, I wasn't able to sleep. Not at all. I'm not sure if it was the stress or the Mountain Dews, but probably both contributed. I spent most of the time staring at the ceiling, thinking of all the cool stuff I could buy if I went back into software development.

So now I have to finish my studying and take the exam on no sleep. What fun.

Before I got on the bus this morning I bought this cool-looking thermos/travel mug from Starbucks so that I could bring coffee into the library with me. Alas, I can't seem to figure out how to keep the fucker from leaking when I drink out of it. Expensive piece of crap.

17 hours to go

2005-11-02T20:49:00.000-05:00

17 hours to go until my numerical methods midterm, and it's not looking great. I've studied all day today, but I can't say it's been especially productive. I can answer basic questions, but this guy isn't going to ask any. The sample questions were just insane. Generally you can expect students to understand a huge amount of material on a surface level, or a smaller amount deeply. This guy wants it all.

He's sort of a freak. He gives a 75-minute lecture, deriving formulas at high speed on the board nonstop the entire time. And completely from memory; he hasn't used the first note yet. It's hard to believe that somebody who knows the material that well can relate to people seeing it for the first time, and in fact he can't. I have to choose during lecture whether to write down what he's saying or try to understand it, because it happens too fast to do both. Usually I start out writing and get behind. So about two-thirds of the way through the class I stop writing and try to understand. But by then it's too late.

One thing I have going for me is that I'm usually reasonably clutch when it comes to math and physics tests. I don't think it's going to help in this case, though, because the derivations are just too long and complicated. If I have to think too much, there won't be time.

My only comfort is that the rest of the class feels the same way. We were discussing it as a group Tuesday before class started. I said "Oh, I know I'm going to fail. I just hope I don't get a zero." Everyone said they felt the same way.

I'm trying to decide how much to sleep tonight. I can try to get a full night's sleep, but that wastes a lot of time. Also, I've had enough caffeine that I may not be able to. There's nothing worse than deciding you need sleep more than studying, only to find yourself lying awake, staring at the ceiling all night. I guesss I need to see how it goes between now and about midnight.

Things are getting hard

2005-11-01T13:08:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting here in the health sciences library with my friend Pam trying to finish a set of review question for my numerical methods class that are supposed to be representative of the exam on Thursday. Actually, we're trying to get started. We've had a week to do them, and neither of us has managed to finish even one of them. I'm not sure anyone else in the class has either. Maybe a couple of the applied math majors.

Thursday we won't have a week, and we won't have the book or other references. We'll have an hour, a pencil and a pad of paper.

Pam has had this professor before, and hated him, but had no choice but to take this class. A week or two ago I asked her if he failed people. She said she didn't think there was much chance of failing. But today I asked her again and she added "Oh, well unless you don't have enough points to pass. Then he'd probably fail you." Uh, yeah.

I did have my committee meeting last week, and their take on it was that all graduate students feel overwhelmed at some point. I'm sure that's true, but all of them don't have this guy for numerical methods.

Movie Reviews

2005-10-30T21:08:00.000-05:00

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...

2005-10-28T11:53:00.001-04:00

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

2005-10-26T17:55:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-26T11:47:00.000-04:00

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)

2005-10-24T17:23:00.003-04:00

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

2005-10-21T18:23:00.002-04:00

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?

2005-10-20T22:55:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-19T14:37:00.001-04:00

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

2005-10-19T00:22:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-18T19:24:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-10-17T15:54:00.000-04:00

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...

2005-10-16T22:37:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-10-16T17:04:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-15T18:05:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-12T20:07:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-10T23:05:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-05T18:39:00.000-04:00

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!