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One of wifey’s xmas presents was tickets to see Neko Case, who played here at the State Theatre last night!
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Neko Case playing her cool 4-string tenor guitar.
Photo by zonagirl, licensed as
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What an awesome concert! She gots lungs, what a singer. As she mentioned on NPR Morning Edition, she can “sing real loud.” There was a tired old dog sleeping on stage. Lucky for him, he was deaf. The only thing he seemed interested in was which was more comfortable to sleep on, his bed or the stage floor. Anyway, amazing concert, and they played a bunch of new songs for the first time, which were all very enjoyable. I’m a big fan of the 4-string tenor guitar, which she played quite a bit (she had an old beaten-up acoustic one, as well as an electric 4-string that looked like an SG, see photo).
Candy hearts and cinnamon lumps and dark chocolate and wifey and ugly betty season one from netflix.
Happy friday.
You’ve probably heard about the Bush administration spying on your phone calls. And about the phone companies turning over your records to W, knowing that he didn’t have a legal right to them. Well, I was upset about this too, but I guess I totally forgot that I lived in a republic where our elected officials are here to serve us… oh yeah! Turns out we have input in this! And right now, the Bush administration is trying to grant AT&T immunity for cooperating with his administration’s illegal activities. Follow this link and the Electronic Frontier Foundation will help you contact your senator about it.
I finally got the holiday time photos from the camera to the web. I’ll expand the album in the future if I find photos from step one in Minnesota, but I think we may not have taken any? I took more photos in Sheboygan Falls cuz of the shiny new camera! :)
My 7-yr-old laptop, as predicted a few months ago, seems to have reached its final days. Aside from the fact that it’s held together by super glue and scotch tape at some vital structural points, it’s also starting to say things that don’t make any sense. Diagnosis: fatal hard drive errors. My futile attempts to find the swap partition or get it to stop spitting out errors about broken file handles have culminated in some desperate exchanges between lappy and me, much like this entry on “SYNTAX ERROR” in the Uncyclopedia.
My favorite part is the the message
Computer over. Virus = Very Yes.
You can subscribe to the rss feed of this list. Everytime I read an article that I want to share, I can put it this list. You can see the posts in their entirety, along with comments (cool feature!), at this site.
Wifey submitted a lolcat! I hope it wins!
moar funny pictures
It’s a reference to “Jesus Christ it’s a lion!” kthxbai.
These are my pandora stations. Consider them bloggd!
I don’t think I want to start piling junk applets like this into my side bar, cuz that’s not pretty, so I’m just putting it into a post. It’s still dynamic, tho! Bye.
Sometimes slashdot has some really fabulous “reporting” on goings-on in the government. I was just reading this slashdot post summarizing many aspects of the EPA’s shady behavior related to California’s automobile emission standards. I love the EPA quote about how following the Freedom of Information Act and disclosing EPA employees’ “frank and honest opinions and analysis” would have a “chilling effect.” These agency people are obviously politicians and are not by any stretch of the imagination scientists. If the EPA’s methods for deciding to block California’s emission standards were at all rational, then there wouldn’t be an issue here.
The judge should just settle this court case right now on the slashdot comments section – flamer/troll showdown!!! I think that would probably turn out well enough. It would be more rational than the EPA’s decision process, and peoples’ “frank and honest opinions and analysis” would be fully disclosed. Bring it on.
Congratulations to my brother Mr. Comfy Pants and froggy_dear on getting engaged (and also froggy_dear’s awesome new job/funding situation)! It is all very exciting and cool and swell and I can’t wait to fly out to Washington!
you can has better odds than lolcats:
Chemistry International just featured an article on a free structure-based search engine for looking up any chemical! It’s called chemspider.
The wow-factor for non-chemists: Interactive 3D graphics! Try this: type in the common name of a compound. Maybe pick a complicated pharmaceutical like vancomycin. Under the structure listed in any of the search results, there is a link called “Jmol.” If you click on this link, you will get a java interface displaying a 3D structure (which was computed using a molecular mechanics computational chemistry program). You can rotate the 3D molecule via click-and-drag, and if you right click on it you get a huge menu full of all kinds of different display options. Okay, maybe the graphics aren’t very impressive to today’s youngster who’s on SecondLife and plays Final Fantasy MXXIV, but these are real molecules dude!!
It’s not that there’s anything special about doing this for a single molecule. The wicked awesome part is how extensive and fast their database is, and how versatile the search options are. And, the whole thing is open-access and community maintained.
Researching stuff on the internet is fun. I started out looking up something fairly important. I forget what it was exactly, but anyway I got side-tracked on several different things. Ever have that happen? It can be really subtle. First you’re investigating a detail that’s still pretty closely related to your main topic, and who knows, maybe you’ll find something helpful. But from there on, the line gets a little fuzzy, and you’re reading details about details. This didn’t happen quite as often before The Internets, back when research was something you did at Ye Olde Librarye.
Anyway, I started out looking up something related to environmental chemistry. The moment I realized that I had gotten way too side-tracked was when I saw this:
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| An exerpt from Principia Mathematica, demonstrating that 1 + 1 = 2. |
Didn’t understand any of that until the last sentence. Huh… good to know, though.
It would be cool to write a computer program that started with a set of logical axioms, and then systematically tried to write as many proofs as it possibly could. Let it run for 100 years or so, and then grep the output file to see how many times it includes the phrase “flowers are pretty.”
i just had a fun interview with a teaching talk on the properties of gases, and in the process of preparing i found this wicked awesome applet created by john gelder and michael abraham and hosted at oklahoma state u. the applet shows you a clear, animated representation of molecular motion according to kinetic molecular theory. the representation changes as you change variables like pressure, volume, and temperature. it’s really fun to play with. notice some cool things:
if you decrease the volume, you can visually verify that the molecules are hitting the surface more often. when molecules bounce off of the surface, they exert a force on the surface. we humans in the macromolecular world define this as “pressure.” the pressure increases when you decrease the volume because the gas molecules hit the surface more often.
you can use helium gas, neon gas, or a mixture of the two. the neon atoms are heavier, but they still have the same average kinetic energy (ie temperature), so they travel more slowly.
they’ve included a really helpful document giving examples of inquiry-based activities using the applet.
hello world! this is my first post ever at this blog. i decided to go with blosxom because it is very geeky and featureless. :)
still trying to figure out how to incorporate comments. this turns out to be a little complicated, and requires a combination of html and perl knowledge, which i will have to acquire. one nice thing about using blosxom is that i have to learn a lot of new things. some might see that as a downside. :)
also, it appears I’ve chosen a cms that hasn’t seen any development (or use) since 2004, at the latest. this also provides me with motivation, in an odd way.
12 Jan, 2008
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This is a personal blog. Posts are categorized into life stuff and geek/science stuff. And, if I post photos, I try to always use the photos tag.
This blog is written in blosxom, a (mostly) dead open source CMS with very little developent or user base, as far as I can tell. But it’s great because all this dynamic glory you see before you is delivered by one simple perl script, with no database or anything. I’ve been learning a lot, though, because I’ve had to change some of the perl code, and I made this theme (called a “flavour” in blosxom) all by myself! The free server space is provided by the Super Dimension Fortress.
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