Category: Me, me, me

Personal blather about one of my favorite people – Me! (This should not be a common topic, actually…)

Why you really do or don’t want me as a student…

Of the classes I took this last semester, there’s only one I haven’t blogged about at least once.

Masochist that I am, I went and took “Applied Calculus”, even though I’d gotten approval to count my previous semester of calculus (about 8 years ago) as fulfilling the mathematics requirement for graduation. The “applied” in the title of the class caught my eye, and after speaking to the instructor before the semester to find out what the class was like I decided that if there was time and money left I’d take the class. So I did.

Although I’d rank it as only the second most useful “Mathematics” course I’ve taken so far, Dr. Wolper was one of the best mathematics instructors I’ve had up to this point, so I’ve got no regrets for having spent the time and money to take it. I suspect I’ll remember a lot more of it than I did of the previous calculus class.

Anyway, getting to the point of this post:

There are times when I am unable to restrain myself and answer homework or exam questions in a terse, boring manner, regardless of the subject. If you’re an instructor and are wondering if you want me in your class, here is something to judge by.

Calculus (for those who don’t know) is more or less the math you use to deal with when, how, and how fast things change. In practical terms, when dealing with real-world applications this often means dealing with a graph of some data. A number of homework (and exam) problems this semester dealt with questions along the lines of “what would a graph of such-and-such a situation look like and how would you interpret it?”. Here’s one from early in the semester:

This was my answer:

You may judge for yourself whether this is a good answer or not…

I can has graduation?

The last undergraduate final is over.

Everything it taken care of save for one overdue library book, which I intend to take care of tomorrow.

All the other fees are paid. All the paperwork is done. I’m pretty sure I got well above the F– that was the minimum I needed on the Philosophy final to achieve the minimum passing grade. In fact, my only current stress about my grades is whether or not I managed to end out my last undergraduate semester with a 4.0 or not.

I FEEL BETTER THAN JAMES BROWN! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let the wild, uncontrollable drunken orgiastic celebration begin!

After my nap…

Make it stop!

Specifically, I think I’m getting a severe case of Noel poisoning.

One of the things I hate most about Christmas is the incessant “re-imaginings” of the same handful of accursed songs, generally done in the same awful forced pretend-emotional tone.

They’ve got “The First Noel” playing in the style of a late-1950’s/early-1960’s Disney Choir style. On a loop. For the last half hour so far.

Ugh. Make it stop…

Thank the Noodly One for headphones, Amarok, and the collection of hard bouncy techno music that happens to be on Igor here…

I’m down to the last class of the last week prior to next week’s finals, so I should have time for a real post again soon…

I’m having too much fun with this.

I finally managed to get Hugin to work, as you can see from the picture of the Dead Fish Museum above.

Okay, it’s the visitor’s center at the Fossil Butte National Monument, but it really is a museum of dead fish. And other fossils. If you click the image to get to the Panoramio page, you can even see where it is on the map: in fact if you zoom in, the building itself is visible in the aerial photo imagery.

Between digiKam’s ability to handle geocorrelation with tracks from my GPS, Panoramio’s support for geolocation and mapping (and connection to Google Earth…), playing with High Dynamic Range digital photography, and now panoramas, I’m beginning to develop an increased urge to travel around and take pictures again…

Nerd Photography in the Big Room

Readers may have noticed by now that I have a cheap but serviceable digital camera that I’ve been using to take pictures which occasionally show up here on the blog. (Hey, there’s another thing that the External Deliverer, in Its benevolence, might bring me: a nicer digital camera.)

I’ve been playing with geolocation for a while now. Just recently, I started also doing some crude playing with High Dynamic Range digital photography. It’s obviously going to take me some work to get it figured out and get better results, but what I’m getting so far doesn’t look too bad, at least in my own opinion. Kind of surreal, like Mars Rover pictures…

I’ve discovered that my Handy-Dandy Linux box has access to a couple of tools that make these easy.

I noticed a few days ago that digiKam is actually able to read .gpx format files downloaded from my GPS and then correlate the track from the GPS with the timestamps on the photos automatically, so in what little spare time I have I’ve been going back through my archives of GPS tracks and timestamped photos and trying to find as many to correlate as I can. I managed to get geolocation tagged into pictures from as long ago as three years or so. I also tagged this more recent one. I saw this place half a decade ago and had been wondering if it was still there. Last week we finally had a chance to visit and sure enough, it was there. If you were wondering where one could go to learn to do the Squirrel Dance, here it is.

Landscape and Sign:Don't Trespass on the 'I'

Today after classes I trudged up to the top of the hill at one corner of the campus with my trusty GPS in hand and took a few pictures, as you can tell. Since Google Earth seems to get most of it’s photos from Panoramio, I’ve started uploading them there. I may also get around to uploading them to flickr one of these days, too. I kind of need some pleasant distraction – I’m starting to hit the “Am I there yet???” phase of the semester. Just another week-and-a-half of classes, then finals, then I’m finally done. At least with the undergraduate stuff.

If you’re bored, there are a couple of additional pictures on the Panoramio site, here. You can also get the ICBM address there, and a .kml file for Google Earth so my pictures will pop up if you happen to run past an area where one of them is while you’re browsing the globe.

’tis the season to be greedy

Members of my immediate family start asking around this time of year about what kinds of things I’d like for Christmas presents this year.

This strikes me as a good way to break the week-long bout of blogstipation I’ve been having. Here, then, is what I want for Christmas, Xmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Cephalopodmas, or whatever gift-giving winter holiday you prefer (each category is sorted roughly in order of desire at the moment):

Ridiculously Expensive Stuff

Which I only list on the off-chance that someone wins the lottery or happens to find an amazing bargain on “e-bay®” or something.

Relatively Expensive Books

Other kinda-expensive-but-maybe-you-can-find-it-at-reasonable-price stuff

Relatively Cheap Stuff (but still spiffy)

I know there was more, but my brain seems to have gone on break right now…

Superman is Homeless!

Two weeks of midterms, and now it’s finally Thanksgiving Break week.

In honor of this celebration of my second most favorite deadly sin, I was going to do a food post, but I’ll save that for later.

Instead, I want to share a shocking and surprising fact that I’ve discovered: People are Stupid.

Actually, that’s not true, it’s really more like “People are Lazy, and Thinking is Work”, but “people are stupid” is easier to say.

Today’s illustration of this principle includes a visit to the former town of “Metropolis, Nevada” (link goes to Google Maps image, centered in front of the hotel. Should pop up in a new window.).

Composite image of the ruins of the Metropolis Hotel

Yes, evidently a bunch of developers from New York thought it’d be a great idea to build a big city in the barren deserts of Northeastern Nevada. This is where the “stupid” comes in.

Check out that map, zoom out and look around. What do you see? Yes, that’s right: sand, sagebrush, and dead grass.

There’s something downright appalling about the way people in the Western United States (where I’ve lived, in various places, for the last couple of decades) romanticize living in the middle of a desert, while at the same time trying desperately to pretend that they’re NOT living in a desert.

Here’s the story of Metropolis, as I understand it, in short form: Bunch of New York developers decide to build a big city for Mormon settlers. In order to pretend they’re not living in a desert, they figure they’ll just dam a spot on the small river to the northeast somewhere so that can stop enough water to keep themselves running.

Now, plunking down in the middle of the desert and pretending there’s nothing odd about building a large water-demanding city in it is a time-honored tradition of the American West, so why didn’t it work here?

Apparently, it’s because somewhere in the Lovelock, Nevada area a bunch of people said “Hey! We were here using that river’s water to pretend we’re not living in a desert first, so you can’t take it away from us by damming the river up there! So there!”. And the courts agreed.

You might think the teachers at the local school would be educated enough to know that “desert” means “lack of water”. I went over to ask about this, but…:

The ruins that once was the Metropolis, NV high school.

I guess school’s out for the moment. I wonder what their sports mascot was. “The Metropolis Dustbunnies?”

I was reminded of all of this by a recent story that was going around about some developer who thinks it’d be a great idea to build a 100,000,000 gallon-per-year water park in Mesa, Arizona. Which, for those unfamiliar with the area, is a desert just like Metropolis, only substantially hotter.

He’s not the first one though. Palmdale, California – out on the edge of the ‘Los Angeles area’ of California, appears to have the aptly-named DryTown Water Park. Palmdale is in the area of the Mojave desert. I have no idea how much water it uses up. I’m certain there are numerous others in the Los Angeles area alone.

It’s something to think about if you find yourself wondering why the Los Angeles area continually induces the shunting of water from other parts of the country to itself, like a cancerous tumor inducing blood-vessels to form in order to feed its own growth.

It’s probably obvious that I’m tired of living in deserts…

This blog does not exist

I say that because in order to exist I must have used my computer to type it in, but George Berkeley “proved” that material things don’t exist. No pictures either this post, because after all my camera doesn’t exist, either.

Okay, the fact that I’ve got a whole cluster of time-sucking school stuff last week and this week to deal with is also a factor in keeping the posts here sparse at the moment. Berkeley just happens to be one of them.

Berkeley was what I would call a “philosophical” Empiricist (whereas I would describe myself as a “practical” empiricist – hence the “Applied” in this blog’s “Applied Empirical Naturalism” subtitle. Put simply, empiricism means that knowledge comes from observation via the senses. I’m a practical kind of guy, and I don’t think this in any way invalidates the use of the intellect to infer additional (testable) knowledge from one’s observations beyond what is directly observed. Berkeley, on the other hand, is a solipsist: he claims that nothing exists unless it is perceived – or is a perceiver.

His argument is a little hard to follow. As best I can tell, he’s starting with a Descartes-like observation that the only thing we ever actually experience are sensory perceptions. In other words, we can experience and know about the sensation of “heat”, but this sensation is just an idea in our minds. Even if there were something “behind” the sensation of heat that was causing it, we could not know anything about it directly, since we only ever experience the sensation.

In a way that is still not entirely clear to me, Berkeley then seems to take the leap from Descartes-style “the only thing I can be certain of existing from my direct observations are ideas, and my mind which contains them” to “since there is no direct empirical basis for claiming the existence of anything else, matter cannot be said to exist”.

Berkeley then goes on to claim that since only minds and ideas exist, and since there are some ideas that seem to be imposed on him (like if he sticks the idea of a red-hot-poker up the idea of his left nostril, he will have the idea of excruciating pain whether he wants to or not), that therefore there must be some other mind from which these ideas come. From this, he makes the leap to claiming that there must be an “infinite” mind which contains all these other ideas, by which he means God™.

This also gives him a convenient explanation for things existing when nobody’s looking at them. See, God is always looking at everything, so nothing that exists is ever not being perceived.

Personally, I’m finding myself wondering if his argument also leaves open the possibility of an animistic reality instead. He claims that everything we experience (including “sensible things”, i.e. things we see, feel, smell, etc.) is just an idea, and an idea existing without a mind is absurd. Instead of postulating the existence of an “infinite” mind, though, wouldn’t the notion that anything that exists actually does, itself, have a mind (or “spirit” if you prefer) also satisfactorily explain how things can continue to exist even when nobody is observing them? Berkeley makes the claim that inanimate objects don’t have minds…but he gives no justification for this claim. I mean, he admits that he can’t directly observe other people’s minds (or the “infinite” mind either) and therefore can’t prove that anyone but him exists, but he never claims that other people don’t exist. So why couldn’t the continued existence of the fork that I ate dinner with be due to the fork’s own mind?

That “thump” you may have imagined hearing was probably Berkeley turning over in his grave. Berkeley was, after all, a Bishop, going through this whole philosophical exercise out of hatred of “skeptics” and “atheists”, and it amuses me to imagine how appalled he’d be to have his arguments used to support something that he probably felt only “heathens” and “savages” would consider…

Yeah, I know, not much of a post, but I’m a bit overloaded at the moment. Nonetheless, more to follow this week over the next few days, at least.

It’s over!

No you can't have $10,000. Not yours.

I am proud to announce that I am 5th Loser in this 2007 College Blogging Scholarship competition!

Lacking the emotional appeal and/or existing promotional network of the top scorers, I was pretty much up the creek without a plunger. Given the popularity contest format of the competition, I’m actually pretty pleased with how I did. My regular readers (judging by the hits to the RSS feed) have approximately tripled or quadrupled, and I did get a small but useful amount of feedback to help improve things. Oh, and hey, I seem to have readers in Berlin and somewhere in Chile, among other places, so now I can say I’m “world famous™”. Though the proportion of voters who actually did check out all of the blogs was pitifully low, it does still look like it was around 1-2% of the voters, which is actually higher than I would have predicted.

I get the impression that some of us running less well known blogs were a little disappointed about the format of the competition, but there’s really no reason to be. All it means is that rather than being a contest for “highest quality” blog, it was a contest for “most effective” blog. Certainly, being able to get your “vote for me” message out to a larger range of people is a valid measure of effectiveness, so the results seem reasonable to me. And I wasn’t the bottom scorer. Judging by the way my score moved, at least some portion of the people who were examining all of the blogs actually did like what they saw here as I was getting a couple of votes a day on average, so I’m doing something right at least.

The only complaint I really have about the “popularity contest” format is this: I think one of the major benefits to humanity of “blogging” is the fact that unlike mainstream media, a blogger can afford to present unusual, less broadly popular content which otherwise would never be made available. Not having to worry about the internet equivalent of “Nielsen Ratings”, we can afford to put up obscure or strange things that only a fraction of the world might be interested in, which is why if you poke around the internet, you can find something that isn’t the latest celebrity crap or badly-reported political scandal. I actually don’t know how much of a role it played in this particular competition, but this sort of approach in general strikes me as something that would be strongly biased towards “mainstream” content. I think a little more love for all of us off-center folks would be in order.

I also hope they’re offering runner-up prizes again this year. Even if *I* don’t win, at least one of “my people” (nerds, that is – hey, you don’t go for a PhD in Neuroscience without being at least a little bit of a nerd…) would get something again this year if they do.

This does mean, though, that I won’t have $10,000 to buy a microscope with. Woe is me. On the other hand, that means I’ve got no excuse not to try begging in front of scientific conferences. I figure that ought to be worth some entertainment, once I get some time to try it. Perhaps by this time next year, I’ll have a bit more fame and popularity and have a better shot at the prize.

Hey, scienceblogs.com, if you want to promote my blog next year when I’m (hopefully) in graduate school, I may have a shot at the prize next time around… (UPDATE: It may not be obvious, but this should be read as good-natured jealously, not some kind of complaint or accusation…)

And now that all that’s over, we’ll be returning once again to my usual nerdity. Stay tuned (some more).

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day…

…but teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

-== We interrupt this blog post to bring you this important announcement: Happy Birthday, Dad!==-

(His birthday was actually yesterday, but this week of school has been grinding me pretty hard and I’d forgotten all about it. He must be so proud – his son can handle a couple of semesters of biochemistry, complex microbial science, working with dangerous chemicals in a lab…but doesn’t seem to know how to use a simple calendar…I am filled with shame.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post:

This here critter is our resident fish. “He” is a classic specimen of real, old-fashioned, Honest-to-Aquaman Carassius auratus auratus – the Goldfish. And not one of those poor mutant freaks who can barely swim, either. No this here fish was rescued from the overcrowded “feeder goldfish” tank of a local Wal-Mart®. Handsome, ain’t he? I had a tough time getting even this good of a picture – every time I get near the tank he swims back and forth in front of me frantically, perhaps worshipping me as the magical fishfood god. He’s been here for about three years now, so I think he’s having a much longer life than most of them.

I’ve had no time to get into it, but part of the reason for having a fish is that I have a casual interest in aquaculture. That is, while I don’t currently have any intention of becoming a professional full-scale fish-farmer, the subject is interesting and, I think, very important in the near future. Once we figure out where we’re going to end up living next year and get settled in somewhere, I have considered trying to do the aquaculture equivalent of a backyard garden, though.

I think aquaculture is going to become extremely important in the relatively near future, as we run into the combination of overfishing of natural stocks, water shortages, contamination of natural waters with pollutants that build up in naturally-existing populations of fish, and the overall effects of climate change. I think understanding how to raise healthy and nutritious aquatic food without wasting water or causing environmental problems is going to be a useful set of knowledge to have. (There, see, not only do I love kittens and puppies and want to make the world a better place, but I’m also interested in Sustainable Environmental Practices™. While feeding the hungry. [Uphill. In the snow. With no shoes…]).

You may be wondering what interest an ex-professional-computer-nerd microbiologist would have in tending a pond full of eukaryotes. Well, aside from the obvious “Hey, I can have more than one interest, you know”, there actually is a lot of microbiological activity involved in the natural processes of the fishes’ homes. Plus, of course, the aforementioned beer doesn’t ferment and bottle itself, you know.

Since one of my interests in this context is water conservation, my main interest is in figuring out how to maintain a healthy “closed” system. In an aquaculture context, a “closed” system is one that you don’t normally add substantial amounts of water to. (An example of an “open” system might include raising fish in pens floating in a natural lake, or having a constant stream of fresh ground or river water pumping through your tanks). This poses certain problems, since you have to feed the fish, and this adds an ever-increasing load of potentially uneaten fishfood and especially of eaten fishfood – that is, fish wastes.

Fishfood being digested by either fish or bacteria ends up adding ammonia to the water, which is poisonous to the fish (and crawdads and whatever else is in there). Also excreted is carbon dioxide, which makes the water more acidic, and unused food also dumps sulfur and phosphorous into the system.

If you’ve ever had a fishtank, you may know about the ammonia. Certain kinds of Oxygen-using bacteria can actually get some of their biochemical energy from turning reduced nitrogen into oxidized nitrogen, ultimately turning the ammonia (NH3) into much less poisonous nitrate (NO3). These bacteria tend to colonize the tank’s filter, where they do their thing using the oxygen in the water that flows through. Even nitrate is dangerous if it builds up too much, though. In an aquarium, they usually recommend just taking out some of the tank’s water and replacing it with fresh water every week or two to get rid of the build-up. I’d show you pictures of the bacteria, but I still can’t afford a decent microscope. (sniffle.)

Anyway, I want to build a denitrification column one of these days. There are bacteria that can “breathe” nitrate in place of oxygen, and in the process they can reduce the nitrate back down to plain old harmless nitrogen gas, which just bubbles out of the water. If you build a long, tall tube full of something like gravel that bacteria can grow on, and then pump the water through it slowly, oxygen-breathing bacteria near the bottom of the tube rapidly use up the oxygen in the water, leaving the nitrate. With no oxygen further up the tube, bacteria that can breathe the nitrate instead can grow like crazy, and exhale the extra nitrogen out of the system.

That’s one way of avoiding the need to use up as much fresh water as you’d need if you relied only on replacing the water to get rid of the nitrate.

I’ll save the sulfur and phosphorous parts for another day. Meanwhile, I think the next podcast or two will deal with MRSA, since it’s been in the news so much lately. I normally find the neglected non-medical microbiology more interesting, but the biochemistry and genetics involved with Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (not to mention S. aureus itself) is pretty interesting, and I find the media discussions of it unsatisfying.

Stay tuned…