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Saturday, June 28th, 2008
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12:31 pm - Courtesy entry
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Hey there, nothing say here. Just thought I'd post in case free accounts somehow get killed if there isn't any activity for too long.
Anyway, I stuck a few comments up over at Baloney.
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| Monday, December 24th, 2007
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6:55 pm - Baloney archives
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| Friday, July 20th, 2007
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11:29 pm
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So, for the nonce (this is addressed to the two of you, or is it pi or more?) I expect most of my immediate future postings to be at Baloney, where you might see art or other postings, from various folk.
You could even flog the site somehow, and, if you actually know who I am, or think I know who you are, get an account, which would be altruistic on your part, no doubt. Hah! You would have to post, or I would complain to the sysop, who would ban you or something! Hah! Citadel!
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| Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
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8:58 pm - How Many More Safe Landings?
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So, one more Hubble repair, and what, just over a dozen safe landings in all before Shuttle retirement? What a thrill the late computer woes were. Can't wait for a nice high res pic of the now more symmetrical Gigantic Expensive Non-Sequiter In The Sky. GENSITS. The wrong ship in the wrong orbit for the wrong price. Bleah. I almost feel guilty about being such a fanboy back in my L5 days, but I don't actually think I was all that effective! Hah! I only sound incoherent because of yrlnga dquork blrrrg.
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| Tuesday, May 15th, 2007
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7:49 pm - This Proposal, no Modesty
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One or more of you two or so readers out there knows about the space mission proposal I'm working on. Well, I just had an authoring breakthrough, totally structural in nature, yet opening the floodgates of gedankenation.
Basically, I'm wanting to set up my own lab to do what I think is personally the most interesting R&D for the project, and that is NOT the space hardware component. I have to come up with a mission idea that requires my technology, does the honest "return a decent science dataset" thing, and is justifiable on its own merits. Thus, my project is sort of a spinoff (or side effect, or blow-by, whatever you want to call it).
The biggest problem is that really, before even Phase A of The Whole Proposal, you'd have to actually get pretty far along with my part of it. Thinking of my audience as NASA study section (or whatever they call it) PIs, I was concentrating on the science mission, not the part I really want to do personally. Actually, parts of it are fairly well written and I still think it a valid approach. It got me a collection of decent paragraphs that are pretty much modular.
The new approach is to put forth my project as the science, with appendices detailing at least two different mission architectures I could support. This is a selfish measure - the proposal will be massaged to meet the specific requirements of any given announcement of opportunity, but it will be serious enough that it has to be read, and the feedback will be invaluable. Free articulate critique. I'll get a better idea of what my possible funders want, and I'll be free to take the improved proposal and go elsewhere for the actual funding.
Plus, in a sense, the idea is to get the proposal rejected the first time, but for all the right reasons. This is a usual happening in science. Essentially, a D- says "you were in the pile of things we'd like to fund, but other proposals actually were better than yours."
The part I moved from the main body of the proposal into the appendix is only about 15% of the current proposal, and by far the most developed (e.g. if the rest of the proposal were as fleshed out as the part that was moved, that part would be even smaller). But it has totally changed my whole approach, and evermoreso invigorated me. I think ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) scottscidmore can verify that I drive around downtown Multibore in an almost blind state when pontificating about this matter already!
current mood: megalomaniacal
current music: Mozart and Bruckner, Thursday
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| Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
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8:09 pm - Universe Da Capo
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I just happened to unexpectedly open a C++ file I was using as a doodlebook once. I'd guess it was fairly recently, though I don't actually remember doodling it (this happens with my physical doodlebooks too. It's great to "re" discover something that is actually a rediscovery). Anyway, that file starts with:
static class Universe {
Universe();
~Universe();
void AddSurface(QuantalSurface);
void RemoveSurface(QuantalSurface);
};
Obviously, I need to use templates, and that "static" in there is pretty much a pusillanimous assumption. Plus, unless constraints are built into the QuantalSurface object, there need to be parameters on the Add and Remove operators. What's lacking, additionally, is some sort of virtual-to-physicality system that this code could ultimately be embedded in. And what are the ethics of providing a destructor at all? One could argue that you have to, because the default destructor would potentially mess with people's lives. On the other hand, if your constructor is all that good, your new object should be able to wring its pointers away from your handles and make itself inaccessible anyway, so investing any intellectual energy in a destructor is simply bad engineering.
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| Monday, March 5th, 2007
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1:47 pm - A cold shoulder to Dr. Doom
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I've been getting tired of seeing Dr. Doom there, with no comments from the Avast Hordes, and it's twelve minutes before I want to harvest my logarithmically growing cells, so that I can wail on their DNA with some DNA I made from some other DNA. I know: I'll blog!
I was persuaded by Barbara, who asked "do you want to make pork shoulder and have people over?" a couple days ago, to make some pork shoulder and have people over. I've never made the stuff before, but it is an incredibly cheap cut of meat. Usually we, like, buy a couple of ducks or a rib roast, or some flounder (dozens, nay, scores of bucks we're talking here), when having guests.
So I stabbed it all over and stuffed a paste made from ground fennel seeds, garlic, pepper flakes, salt, and black pepper into the slits. We have a 5 quart Dutch oven, which is small compared to 7 pounds of bone-in pork shoulder, but I was able to sear the hunk fairly well nevertheless, and prop it up on some rolled up bits of foil to keep it out of its own juices. Roasted for half an hour at 450, lid off (I'm thinking the searing step could be avoided by doing this step at 500, actually, like I do at the very end of roasting a beef), then lid on, 250 for about 8 hours. It released a lot of fluid, which had to be drained (used half of that with some water to make a pilaf) to get it below the bottom of the meat.
Pure unctuousity. Falling-off-the-bone, eat-meat-with-a-straw, glistening totem of culinarity! No gustatory bummers here! I think somebody may have gotten a picture of it, which I may post if I get around to it. There are leftovers, hurray. Our neighbor Emily came over for dessert after having gotten stuffed at some thing she had gone to, but I persuaded her that the pork would be just as good as either the no-bake "cheesecake" from Lois, or the apple crisp that Barbara made. I was, of course, right.
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| Saturday, February 10th, 2007
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12:58 pm - Marvelous!
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I was hoping for Sauron, or at least a Nazgul, but I'm guessing the Dark Lord and his minions aren't part of this quiz. At least I'm not a DC villain:
Your results:
You are Dr. Doom
| Dr. Doom |
| 66% |
| Poison Ivy |
| 61% |
| The Joker |
| 51% |
| Magneto |
| 50% |
| Apocalypse |
| 49% |
| Mr. Freeze |
| 49% |
| Lex Luthor |
| 46% |
| Dark Phoenix |
| 43% |
| Juggernaut |
| 40% |
| Riddler |
| 40% |
| Green Goblin |
| 36% |
| Mystique |
| 32% |
| Catwoman |
| 31% |
| Kingpin |
| 26% |
| Venom |
| 21% |
| Two-Face |
| 16% |
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Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.
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Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz
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| Friday, February 9th, 2007
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1:25 pm - Fearful Symmetry
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So, in just over a month, those folks down in Florida are going to torch off another set of controlled explosions, beginning a mission that will, if it doesn't smoke the crew, and if everything else also goes well, render the Large Useless Sculpture in a Dumb Orbit somewhat more symmetrical. They'll retract the other side of the Z-truss photovoltaics, and add a matching PV array on the other side of the one they recently installed. I'm already angsting out about it, and no, I don't give two shits (or one, or even zero) about the astronaut love triangle. Jebus! have you seen those astronaut wimink? Do they intentionally select non-hotties? Or maybe it's just that the hot women scientists and engineers go into molecular biology and not aerospace.
I use the word "hot" completely platonically, of course, and with no implied criticism of intellectual fitness. Platonic fish-brain, oh yes, that's me! Actually, I used to think that Sally Ride was kind of hot, back when I thought the Shuttle was kind of cool.
I'm also somewhat angsting out about the Mars Reconsaissance Orbiter, but the only instrument I care about (the ground penetrating radar) hasn't been operating fitfully like the atmosphere sounder and the high res camera.
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| Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
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9:06 pm - Damn Color Thieves
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I think Michael Barnsley ("Let's play the chaos game!") is hallucinating, and boy am I glad!
Without actually doing anything but notice that there is essentially nothing but theorems, proofs, and exercises between the graphics, it is obvious that this perseverator upon gratuitous self-similarity has stumbled across something great (I would have told you this 10 years ago too, but since then I hadn't really seen anything from him, but the new stuff is great!). I still don't see how to apply it to cell biology or the standard model of physics, or the holographic brain (which I still maintain is a bullshit idea), though in fact it subsumes L-systems (can you say "massively subsumes?"), but even more emphatically than I would have said 10 years ago: "there's something to this."
Oh. You'll probably be wanting a link. Check it out here, then if you want to, buy it here.
current mood: geeky
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| Saturday, November 18th, 2006
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1:35 pm - The greatest shit story ever told
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So there I was, pants down at the commode, ready to go. It didn't take much to get things started; in fact I could tell almost immediately this would be a good session. After the first bit of pressure, everything started flowing out as if it wanted to leave. Not impatient, but orderly and eager. Very relaxing.
After just a moment, I knew this session would be not just good, but particularly good. Things just kept going and going. This has happened before - afterwards I'd check and see a perfect coil, like well-vended soft-serve ice cream, almost worth a photograph. After a long and gratifying expulsion, I applied the tissue, and - voila! - I wondered if I were self-cleaning. My excitement was almost unbounded by now. I went ahead and used a second tissue, just in case I had somehow missed something (I hadn't), stood up, re-secured the pants, and turned around to look, expectantly anticipating that perfect coil.
To my surprise, I saw nothing at all. The long, flexible, and (evidently) amazingly cohesive rod must have threaded itself up over the trap and down the sewage pipe. Once enough had flowed over the trap, that pioneer mass was able to pull the rest of the material down with it.
No wipe, no flush (OK, obviously I wiped, and I DID flush, but apparently these were not strictly necessary). Except for some kind of skiffy situation involving Star Trek transporters and sphincter sensors, I really think it (shitting) just doesn't get any better than this!
[Note - I went ahead and edited this post a bit - you never know whether more than one person will ever read it!]
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| Tuesday, November 14th, 2006
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4:19 pm - I'm sure you'll understand me.
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| What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio. | | The West | | | Boston | | | North Central | | | The Inland North | | | The South | | | Philadelphia | | | The Northeast | | What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes |
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| Friday, October 20th, 2006
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5:17 pm - I must be a geezer. Where's Descartes?
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I had never seen this almost-ten-year-old web page, which comes as something of a surprise, but I think that, almost-twenty-years-ago it would have been just as amusing. It's sort of a PKD* moment, reading this page, and imagining what I would have thought of seeing it (like, from the future, man) back in the summer of '87.
*Not saying that I know Dick, here. Just thought I'd say that I wasn't saying that. It's true. I don't know Dick.
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| Saturday, October 7th, 2006
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9:30 am - I don't like yogurt...
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...in fact, I even dislike fro yo, and of course vinegar (in ketchup, for some reason, I can stand vinegar, and in sourdough, lactate).
Thus, I prefer to refer to Uchu O Tabi Shita Yogurt as:
Tabby Shit.
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| Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
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7:48 am - Scary Movie
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I name and number my experiments. Usually they are boring names, like "Candidates in high salt." However, I just did a double-take on experiment 113, thinking of horror movies and their serials:
Mutants for ESEM II
Are YOU for ESEM, mutant? I am!
While 113 is not actually part of the movie plan, I DO actually plan to make ESEM movies...
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| Friday, September 29th, 2006
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7:37 am - Spaced In
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Well, it looks like the latest round of Let's Move People Around with Rockets hasn't ended in disaster, and I can now obsess about upcoming STS-116, which (if the launch doesn't snuff anybody) could result in permanently shutting down the power on the ISS, or leaving us with a Z-truss solar DIS-array, or, of course, a crew and ship fragged on re-entry.
But this all won't happen until at least December, and I will have given another lab meeting and visited Worcester by then, and so will be feeling a bit relaxed nevertheless. A nice solstice present would be a real treat!
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| Saturday, September 16th, 2006
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8:39 pm - Cordiality
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Ah, the sweet pleasures of debauchery. We just had Dave and Stacy over as adjuncts to Family Pizza Night. Dave being a Martian and all, and capthraw having donated some formerly confiscated, formerly 100 proof solvent extract of - what is it, Rubus discolor?, we trundled out the material and sampled it all around (neighbor Emily, and (parent outlaws) Roy and Kay, as well as (sibling outlaws) Pete and Lois joined in as well).
Nice. Very nice. I would only say that some kind of Advanced Closure System might have marginally improved things, though to tell the truth, the bits of cork floating in the cordial glasses didn't detract AT ALL from the fine, fine experience.
Once again, a hat's off (indeed, a hat IS off!) to Gus.
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| Thursday, September 7th, 2006
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7:19 am - Supremely Plain
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I thought I would end up with "plainly nerdy," but I guess by interpreting things like "my room" to mean "the laboratory in which I am working," I advanced my score somewhat. For example there ARE signs like "biohazard" in my room, and there SHOULD BE these signs, but this is not true of the computer room at home, where I don't spend much time anymore. I conclude that my "geekiness," (as in Geek Code) would actually come out closer to "plainly geeky," if I were to take such a test. Anyway:
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| Monday, September 4th, 2006
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8:06 am - Now don't look!
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I was listening to NPR the morning Columbia disintegrated. I heard something along the lines of "...no contact with the astronauts..," and knew it was toast. Forecasting the incessant perseverating prating of the radioheads about possibilities, I just shut off the radio and fumed. Something I often say, I said often that day: "Fuck NASA; Fuck NASA; Fuck NASA."
Years prior, I was toiling in the shipping department of a small software company near Seattle (not even a lesser Devil, let alone lesser Satan), justifying my existence during the day (during the night I justified my existence as the night operator of the PDP-11/70s). From a neighboring office's quiet radio (so quiet as to be barely noticeable), I somehow heard some words about "...space shuttle..." and "...no parachutes...," in a "tone of voice." Again (can you say "again," in a second reminiscence when you're going backwards through time?), I knew they were toast. I was still naive about NASA then, so I didn't curse them. Instead, I walked out of the building, as The Boss was just parking his BMW. "Still want to be an astronaut?" he mocked through his open window. "Yeah, yeah," I said, or something like it. "Fuck you; Fuck you; Fuck you," I thought as I walked up to the other building where the mainframes were.
All this is to preface my anxiety about the upcoming Shuttle launch attempt. There's something snuff-film about them for me now, both launch and landing. I can't actually bear to watch them live, especially this one with running the SSMEs at higher than usual rating 'n stuff. The station's stupid, the shuttle's stupid (OK, so I was stupid to be so naive about them when I was a young L5-er back at the UW). But they're there, and I DO enjoy watching the station actually take shape, as sort of a useless kinetic sculpture in the sky.
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| Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
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12:36 pm - Not AeroBAKING!
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I "ain't superstitious," so I'm not going to knock on wood or cross my fingers, or anything like that. I will just endure the anxiety until I learn what happens with the six minute burn that will take the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter out of its atmosphere-grazing orbit, and into preparations for a final set of orbital tuning maneuvers.
It is a sad thing that we do not have a constantly replenished set of orbiters at every planet, and many dwarf planets, now in this modern age. Oh well.
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