The Dichotomous Trekkie

So LJ doesn't feel neglected.

Fri, 08 May 2009 05:31:24 GMT

A teeeny update, since, well, most updates have been living on the main blog. And by teeny, I mean, haul over to the main blog to get some nerdery about Windows 7. And nerdery on dinosaurs and such. Because, you know, they're awesome.

And besides, who wouldn't want to follow me there and get cool stuff like the Tuesday Tetrapod?

Follow up the links if you want to know what that is! (Another bonus: easier to code there, as I put in a bunch of CSS shortcuts)

Comics!

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:04:21 GMT

So I've been posting with increasing regularity on my "official blog", mostly because, well, I've been posting "pertinent" stuff there -- news, science stuff, etc, and not so much personal stuff anywhere. I suppose my personal life has been a combination of routine and bursts of not-so-pleasant, meaning poor LJ-fodder.

However, Natasha pointed out that my latest entry on my real blog about the "Stick Figure Science" competition would actually make pretty decent LJ-material. I encourage anyone that's interested in either drawing comics in any way or interested in science in any way to take a crack at it. I mean, it'll be fun, something cool to share among us, and hey, won't it be snazzy if your comic ends up being used by the NCSE? The idea is by forcing everyone to do stick figures, it should put everyone on fairly even footing.

More details, etc, are at the blog link above (including a PDF of the comic -- it was done in Illustrator, so it's a vector graphic. I have some teeny details on the "cladogram" in particular), but for LJ, I've put a copy of mine below the cut.

Enjoy!

JVP

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:37:21 GMT

So, this is something interesting to post on my LJ -- most of my posts of late have been on my "Real Blog" and sciency and such. Still trying to reserve this space for things more speculative, personal, etc.

I will find out shortly how the paper submission process over at JVP ends up! I'm not sure if I should be worried or excited or jazzed, and right now my stomach can't quite figure out which it wants to feel:

Here's hoping!

Irony meter = broken

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:25:41 GMT

This article about the Washington atheist sign at the capitol building is fun reading. Apparently, they're protesting the "hate speech" of declaring that:

"religion is but myth and superstition"

The ironic part? The same folks are holding signs that say "Atheists go to hell" and have preachers saying "It is time to chase out of the house of God all the unbelievers and evildoers". Well, not to mention there is certainly a credible case to be made that if saying "religion is a myth" is hate speech (untrue), then saying "unbelievers go to hell" is certainly a stronger form of hate speech.

(To be clear, I don't think it is ... I just think its brainwashing. It becomes hate speech when they think that unbelievers *should* go to hell).

Oh fundies. Always a source of entertainment.

Things Done

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:36:56 GMT

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you're not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelos David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got/Gave flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone's life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day

D&D Meme

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:10:08 GMT

I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Wizard (4th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-13

Dexterity-14

Constitution-14

Intelligence-18

Wisdom-11

Charisma-13

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.

Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Follow-up to last post

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:38:07 GMT

Well, I sent an email to some of my friends asking them to write letters, too, maybe hoping that well, enough voices might influence some third level aid and have some itty bitty effect. When Peter sent me this reply:

"Sorry, but I've heard that nuclear power generates nuclear waste, and even after processing it must lie underneath the ground for ~8000 years to become safe. Thus, I don't really trust nuclear power.

Care to convince me otherwise?"

I chose to follow up with this:

Inevitably it generates nuclear waste, but the problem is largely mitigated by breeder reactors. By using these, we can essentially tune the type of waste we would like. It is generally preferred to have short half-life products, which is primarily produced by breeder reactors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor ). The idea is it will lose essentially all of its radioactivity in a manageable time frame, thus having to be stored for a much reduced period of time. The standard nuclear waste has a half life on the order of 25,000 years. This isn’t particularly dangerous, if you consider the meaning of “half-life”. If you lived next to nuclear waste for say 75 years, you will absorb 1-.5^(75/25000) = 0.26 % of its total radiative output. Consider Tin-126, for example, with a half life of 2.3e5 years and a decay energy of 4.1 MeV. A LD-50 in 14 days dose for a 100 kg man (for a 126 g, or 1 mol sample) occurs after 3.7 hours, with 45 minute exposure being equivalent to 5% increase in cancer risk (1 Gray, or 1 J/kg). It is a particularly nasty by-product though, being 20-50 times worse than virtually every other byproduct with a shorter half life. A more representative isotope such as Pd-107 instead gives the same man about 9 mGy dose over an entire day – about the same as an abdominal CT scan (8 mGy). We can to some extent tailor products by choosing the reactions we use to generate energy, so we can make even these long-lived isotopes pretty safe inherently, in addition to the fact they’d be buried in a mountain. (Half life and sample products source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Physics )

Short half-life products are much worse during their toxic time, but have half lives between 5 and 90 years. The containers we have made have been theorized to have zero degredation from erosion for approximately a 10,000 year period and are furthermore tested by such means as crashing trains into them, dropping them from 10 m onto steel spikes, and underwater submersion to ensure integrity over long periods. This means the material is essentially guaranteed to stay sealed up for 100-2000 half lives, leaving less than 10^(-31) of its original mass left over. For reference, this is the equivalent of the sun reducing to a tenth of a kilogram! (HAH astro rocking the absurdly high exponents again) This may further be mitigated by new initiatives such as the LIFE project (http://www.contracostatimes.com/localnews/ci_10951822?nclick_check=1&forced=false) that recycle nuclear waste for further fission, further reducing half-lives.

Whew! Hopefully this sheds some light on why I’m not particularly concerned. Besides, look at the alternatives. The only two more efficient things are throwing matter into black holes and M/AM reactions. “Renewables” such as wind and hydro are essentially secondary solar effects; to power the US, the entire state of Connecticut (at 50% efficiency for 12 hours/day, storing half of that power for night-time use, with a nominal solar radiation of 500 W/m^2 at the equator. Area: ~ 14,000 km^2 or 14e9 m^2) would be needed to produce our current 3.5 TW of power usage. It’s simply not practical. To produce the world’s current 15 TW usage, we’d need about the equivalent of West Virginia coated in photovoltaics. Multiply as appropriate to accommodate for cloud cover and room for expansion (say, quadroupling it to account for it all) and you get every last square centimeter of *Texas* covered in photovoltaics. Again, plain and simple not practical. Wind and hydro both take more area to generate the same amount of power.

For other alternatives, “clean” coal isn’t, CNG is a carbon emitter and H_2 compresses so poorly that it takes as much or more fossil fuel burning to compress it as you save (simple PVNRT calcs). Finally, the P-P chain used in the sun (which is aneutronic) requires either solar compression or a temperature 10x hotter than the solar core. D-D and D-T fusion produces neutron side products, even when those neutrons are used to breed more tritium courtesy Li-6. H+B-11 can be used for aneutronic fusion, but power densities drop considerably and supersolar temperatures are still required; that is to say, the only realistic fusion will still generate radioactive byproducts. As a species and a country, we need to come to grips with the fact that to stop destroying planetary level ecology we have to accept geologically short to short-medium term storage of nuclear byproducts leading to extremely localized hot-spots. There’s simply not a good way around it.

I hope this, if not outright convinces you, at least puts a little doubt into your mind that maybe makes you see why, for example, Kit and I are both extremely pro-nuclear power.

Now, waiting for House to download ...

Windows 7

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:56:40 GMT

A simple screenshot for now:

Taken on Liz this evening.

Election 2008

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:23:26 GMT

Voted!

I swear, I've slowly been warming up to Rob's sort of politics -- minimal interventionism. All measures got "No" votes from me with the exception of 11 (redistricting) and WW (park bonds). A part of me kinda hopes the train bill passes, though, but I'm not sure how well it will work.

Now, CBEST this evening, then watching election returns -- hopefully I'm back by 7 for the Daily Show!

Vote AGAINST Sarah Palin

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:27:01 GMT

Newsweek has a superb article on Sarah Palin, which I think everyone should read. She is grossly incompetant, and as I have alluded to in other places, my vote this November will not be for or against any other candidate; my vote will only be against Sarah Palin.

I strongly encourage everyone who reads this blog to take a look at Sciencedebate 2008 and Nature's science interview (John McCain declined; his previous stances are listed, however).

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Vote

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:08:04 GMT

Deadline for CA registration is 10/20. Vote!

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 02:18:10 GMT

I despise NVidia. It just removed my 750 gig from my computer, and its taken over Windows' disk initialization. This means that even if my data is safe, I can't even get windows to acknowledge a drive is there until NVidia puts it into a raid, which tells Windows its blank, which means it won't access it till its formatted ....

ARGH!

Google Chrome

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:11:12 GMT

So, Google Chrome is out, and I must say, its a very attractive browser.

It also doubles FF3's Sunspider javascript benchmark speed, nearly triples Opera 9.52's, and nearly quadruples IE8's. Very slim browser with an installation routine that is under 500 kb and the whole install takes well under a minute, and installs cleanly -- doesn't ask for admin privledges.

On a technical basis, it has uses a tweaked WebKit renderer (after Safari) but doesn't do Safari's horrible proprietary font-smoothing; copies IE8's tab process isolation (thus, if one tab crashes only that tab crashes, not the browser); has a startup page very similar to Opera's speed dial (but lacking Opera's wand feature and speed-dial shortcuts); largely matches Vista's UI conventions in Vista (big plus); renders SVGs like Opera (see if this will render in your browser, and see what happens when you zoom).

Gotta say, I really like it. We'll see if it becomes browser of choice over Opera for speed, or if Opera will end up winning with its extra keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

(Cross-posted at blog.revealedsingularity.net

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:46:21 GMT

I took about 300 photos of my room and we got this:

(if the embed doesn't work, try going to here.

Whoo!

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:19:04 GMT

Apparently some spambot got ahold of my blog and spammed the same comment on all the entries.

Sigh, I'll remove it after I find a countermeasure. There's got to be a plug in for it ...

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:19:10 GMT

You know what sucks? Being woken up a couple hours early by all the hums you're sleeping with turning off, the chirper outside starting to beep, and your battery backup starting to beep. Argh.

Taking the 840 bus this morning ~_~

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:13:20 GMT

I kind of suspect Comcast skews their tests for known speedtest sites:

Tree of Life

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:16:22 GMT

A little snippet from the class I'll be teaching, by way of reference material for something the kids will do:

That took a surprisingly long time, and much research -- which the phylogenetic tree I've been working on has helped with. Whoo. Start teaching on Monday ...

Damn you, Moz and IE

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 09:40:19 GMT

Woot! I have managed to fix most of the back end problems and cross-browser odditry (yes, I made that word up) on the evolution site. The better part of today was spent hacking CSS to get it to work across various browsers. Its a pity that Opera doesn't have a leading market share -- I had to remove two features because of Moz/IE buggy or nonexistent implementation of the :before and :after psueo-elements and the "content" and "counter" functions. I was also going to try to get the title to look nice by CSS, so I wouldn't have an image that scales badly. For example, look at

You can see that while the CSS that was quickly done looks as good as the image at standard resolutions, the zoom/nonstandard resolution favors the vector fonts. I was working on getting the placement debugged when I realized that only Opera (again) supports the CSS text-shadow property. *sigh*. I might just try to make it look good in CSS and better when it all works.

Other coding hiccups I ran into today included the fact that my server was running PHP4, which meant:

1) try{} and catch{} statements don't work.
2) include() and require() cannot pass variables by RETURN $FOO;
3) include() and require() will not access global-level functions if the file extension is *.php, and must be *.inc instead
4) import faliures return verbose warnings rather than TRUE or FALSE

Alas, I am hungry, but there are no spaghetti-o's, West Coasts, or Nude Sushis down here.

Tomorrow, send out LHS emails for critters we'll need for Adapt or Die, and more website work. Also need to fix the problem with IE7 rendering image colours differently than the hex value. Its a known issue, but I forget the work-around.

Thus ends a computer update.

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:55:13 GMT

At 4am, half asleep, I have to post this because its too damn rediculous. So, I leave the house today to go down to SoCal for a visit. About halfway to the BART station, I realized that I left my contact lens container and my glasses at home. Whatever, I thought -- I can live for a week with just contacts, and I have another lens container in my backpack.

Fast forward to tonight. I search my backpack for my spare lens container its not there. I have no idea what happened to it, but OK, whatever; I had two spares living in my drawer down in SoCal. I search my drawer, and nada. Did it get moved to Tasha's drawer? I check. There I find it, but deceased: its bottom part, the part that , well, holds the lenses, was broken off. WTH? OK, well, that's OK. THere's an unopened OptiClean whatever on the counter. They come with lens cases. I open that up, and nada -- it is empy. Well, I think, that's OK. I have a whole box of peroxide lens solutoin in one of my bags that I brought down from Berk. I dig around, find the bag, find the box, and its been re-sealed shut with tape, and there is no lens case to be had. OK, so, this is getting interesting. I sneak into my folks' bathroom to steal a lens case from my mom. I grab gthe first one I touch, and go to my bathroom, in which I notice, it, too, has been cannabalized. WTH? So I sneak back into my folks' bathroom and this time quietly shut the door, turn on the light, and dig around for a lens case. Finally I find a cheap two compartment one. That'll do.

Whoever thought taking off contacts could be such an adventure?

This blind writer begs forgivness for typos above; I'm not going to kiss Liz's screen just to seek out spelling errors.

Bedtime.

On Compression

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:07:18 GMT

Compression, particularly 7zip, is amazing:

That's right. < 1% compression ratio. w00t.

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:39:10 GMT

Odd fact: I've been working in Emacs so much that recently I've been forgetting to C-c to copy, relying instead on the highlight-to-copy features of Emacs, *Nix, and Trillian. It makes me feel dorky when I paste something completly out of place into a conversation.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:28:22 GMT

Watch this. Now.

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:55:18 GMT

You know what? I've gotten every single herp down to family. That's right. And I got the thing to expand and collapse. All while keeping it XHTML strict!

Take that. Woot! Eventually links to articles will be living by the appropriate node/family. Pity that FF breaks it the worst. Damn cross-browser nonsense.

(Comments appreciated)

Goodbye, Space Shuttle

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:06:25 GMT

Looks like the last shuttle mission is going to be May 31, 2010. Well, I have two years to save up money for a Florida trip, it seems.