Merry Christmas!

I have been busy lately but that is a good thing. (See my first post.) I am stopping by today to spread some holiday cheer. Here is a little christmas music that you can put on softly in the background at your gatherings this holiday season. I will leave you with a new holiday classic. Move over Charlie Brown.

Merry Christmas!

LaTex my @ss

I cannot even begin to tell you how much I loathe LaTex. I don't buy the arguement the author can "ignore the details of typsetting and focus on the content." I have wasted more time trying to figure out simple things that can be done by clicking a button in a word processor. Don't get me wrong, MS Word has its own problems. Don't even get me started on endnotes in Word. Perhaps I should try communicating my data through interpretive dance rather than journal articles?

BTW - Winedt you can eat it.

Greenhouse

Here are some pictures of my greenhouse in various stages of construction. I laid out the design in Google SketchUp before starting. SketchUp is not as full featured as AutoCAD or SolidWorks but it was sufficient for this project. I will post the file after I fix up a few details. It is raining today so construction is on hold. :(

Man tools

I have started building my new greenhouse! My intention was to use the tools that I had available at the time: a cordless drill, miter box, and hammer. Unfortunately, the second battery for my 15 year old Craftsman drill finally died and it was not obvious were I could find a replacement. The two web sites that I found selling replacements looked sketchy to say the least. So, I bit the bullet and bought some new tools.

Of course, when I brought my new purchase into the apartment I received the prerequisite  harassing. Many jokes ensued about "man tools" but I had to laugh when I opened the box and the teenager stopped in mid-jibe and said. "Oo, shiny!" Everybody likes new stuff and black and yellow is a pretty cool color scheme.

I planned to only buy a new drill but for some extra cash I picked up a cordless circular saw and reciprocating saw as well. (The light that came with the set seems lame but I will go with it for now.) Having the circular saw has been nice as I started with only a hand saw and that was a bit of a pain. I can tell that the reciprocating saw has a taste for blood (and bone) and I am very careful when I use it. I am a big fan of engineered safety barriers and the reciprocating saw leaves me a little uneasy. The 18V tools seem to have plenty of power. Neither of the saws has felt underpowered and the drill arguably has too much torque.

Safety First! Go Bears!

The Straw Man

My wife made a wonderfully insightful comment this morning. She suggested that the reason the proposal by Paulson was so light on content and demanded no oversight was to shift the debate away from whether or not we should have a $700 billion+ bailout to a debate about how we are going to do it.

We talked back and forth about what letters we should write to our congresspeople and my letter was just over 2000 characters long. I think that the message she chose to send after careful consideration was exponentially more effective and succinct: If you vote for this bill I will not vote for you in the next election. It captured what I was trying to say in very powerful way.

I have long thought that she is smarter than I am and this is just another example of why. You can see why I love this woman.

Garbage in garbage out

I heard a piece on NPR yesterday morning (at ~2:35) where the analyst or broker being interviewed blamed the current financial crisis on "rocket scientists in the backroom" playing with "Bunsen burners" and "test tubes." I don't think that it takes a rocket scientist to realize that the rate of increase in home prices was greater than the rate of increase in income. That is a freshman calculus problem and everyone on Wall Street should have taken that class. The entire model was unsustainable. (and very likely unstable if you looked at the second derivative.)

I am irritated that the incompetence of these people is swept under the rug by blaming the stereotype of a scientist in a backroom for the failings in the boardroom. No one questions this notion that scientists are inherently bad people. It feeds into a general intellectual phobia in this country where mental achievement is dismissed and mocked while monetary achievement is valued even if it is accompanied by ignorance and a lack of intellectual curiosity. I believe that this entire problem is due to greed and lack of discipline. Come on people this isn't rocket science.

National Economy: What happened to high risk - high reward?

I must say that I am a little frightened and a lot outraged by the current financial situation. First off, I am vehemently opposed to the bailout plan as proposed by the Administration. Between the various wars that we are waging and at least $700 billion it seems unlikely that the next Administration will be able to accomplish anything other than cleaning up this mess. There will be no money for tax cuts or for new programs. This level of debt hampers those programs that I would like to see enacted by the next administration. I encourage everyone to write your congressperons and the President to express your opinion on this topic, either pro or con. The interests of the nation will be best served at a time like this if more of us voice our opinions and concerns.

In my letter, I encouraged all parties to take a measured approach that draws from the wealth of expertise and intelligence that we have in this country. While a timely solution may be required, I don't think that rushing this is a good idea. This is a time to call on the country's best and brightest to develop a reasoned and measured plan. These people know how to work under pressure and compromise.

Also, I am not impressed with any $700 billion plan that can be written on three pages of paper. Grant proposals for $3ook/year are often detailed 30-50 page documents with hundreds of references justifying the proposed work. The Large Hadron Collider is estimated to cost around $3 billion and I am sure that proposal came in several volumes.

Paul Krugman (economist, Princeton faculty, columnist) has had some interesting analysis on this topic.

A quick update

I have been fairly busy the last few weeks and have been remiss in posting here. I submitted a draft of my paper to my advisor and I feel pretty good about it. We will see what she says. Otherwise, I have had a fairly productive few weeks.

I am concerned about the current financial crisis and I can't say that I am thrilled about the proposal that was put forward by the administration. I will have more to say on this later.

Stay tuned for pics of my latest project. (The Ark)

I think we're gonna need a bigger boat

I was surprised about a week ago when I went outside and found that Odontcidium Tyler Ku 'Ben Berliner' was developing an inflorescence. In that short amount of time it has grown to be over 2' long and is still in its early stage of development! I have never bloomed this before and I am not sure how big it is going to get. This, along with most of my current collection, was a generous gift from Bob Hamilton and John Leathers. This particular plant came from the back corner of their greenhouse where all of the plants have an impressive number of flowers on massive spikes. I am excited to see where this goes but I am also nervous that I am not going to have enough space. I currently have this in my 4' high shade house on my patio. To give you a sense of scale, the mesh in the background has a 1/2" spacing.

Fe Eral Vernment

I made a mistake this week by responding to an email that I should have ignored. But, it was Monday morning and I didn't quite feel like working yet. The last line in this email read, "This is not sent for discussion, if you agree forward it, if you don't, delete it. By me forwarding it, you know how I feel." I am not a big fan of politics that encourage mindless adherence to a party line especially when it encourages reactionary responses to trivial issues that reasonable people can discuss.

My mistake was responding without fully appreciating the depth of the debate. (and vitriol!) I had never considered this issue before and my opinion was formed in the twenty seconds that it took me to read the email. I feel that my opinion came from a sense of fairness and mutual respect. However, this debate has some established arguments and I apparently stepped too close to the opposing side.

I sent my response and was floored when my brother was the one that responded to me. It appears that he is well versed in one side of this argument and we ended up going back and forth several times via email. The arguments that I framed were not the greatest but at this point I knew that this was a debate that would not be won by either of us. So, instead I decided that it would be more fun to pick at his arguements one by one just to get a rise out of him.

I dislike these "issues" that are a distraction from the real problems that we face as a nation. I do believe that we have more in common than not and that civil discourse is possible.

Next time I will just delete the email.

Dancing Robots are Cool

Thanks to my sister for sharing this with me.

2 x 2 = -3

My data analysis came to a grinding halt last week when I discovered a bug in the latest version of Origin. Appartenly, the program doesn't know that when you multiply two positive numbers together that you should get a positive result. I am guessing that this is a two's complement problem. The first column of data was general numbers (i.e. 0.1234) and the second column was in scientific notation (i.e. 5.67e-8). The program must handle these two data types differently. Regardless, the answer is wrong and I need to figure out a work around. I am bummed about this because I want to finish this analysis for the paper that I am working on.

In general, Origin 8.0 is relatively buggy compared to Origin 7.5. The network license manager (software) is a lot crabbier too.

Post_0

Welcome to my blog! I plan to use this space to share my thoughts on current projects, milestones in finishing my thesis, and other general thoughts that I have about the world and my family. My intent is to be prolific in posts pertaining to my thesis and bring that section to a close rapidly. However, the inclusion of entries in the first topic will give you a clue as to progress on the second.

Please bear with me as I settle into this new routine.

All the Best,

D-