- I guess waking up at 4am is closer to being on a "normal" schedule… #
- Mmm. French toast made with English muffins. Is that culturally insensitive, or does the maple syrup from Quebec make it okay? #
- getting occasional random ~10 second hangs in just about all apps under #snowleopard Annoying! #
- I find the fact that we still nominally celebrate Labor Day in this country somehow darkly comic, or ironic, or something. #
- Holland has about the same population and land area as LA+Ventura+San Diego+Orange County. If only we had their bikes and healthcare. #
- WTF? I'm at Caltech and I can't read old Icarus articles online. I hate the scientific publishing industry with an unhealthy passion. #
- Amazing how tiring getting up at 4am is… #
- The last day of a long weekend is apparently not the best time to get dumpster bread. Too much accumulated garbage obscuring the quarry. #
- Don't you think you're playing God? Oh, I'm not playing. -Craig Venter Synthetic Biology Masters Class w/ George Church http://bit.ly/Knh3T #
- I think I'm losing weight as my thesis gains it. That's probably not terribly healthy. #
- I hate getting gigantic e-mails that have been hopelessly garbled by an ancient version of some GUI e-mail client. #
- Reading a review of the work in my field, it sometimes feels unclear whether it's even worth the effort to tell them they're wrong. #
- It's 2:30am, does anybody know where my Michelle is? #
- Well I can only hope that the mystery sleepover isn't happening in a medical facility. #
- gall dernit, I still ain't registrated! #
- Well that was exhausting. Even if I hadn't been up since 2:30am. #
- Can't find a good full-screen slideshow for new @HubbleTelescope pix. They should set up a @flickr acct. or mediarss feed. #
- I'm on the verge of being genuinely creeped out by the preternatural relevance of the webcomics I follow. Telepathy will only make it worse #
- Ah, mobile phones and cars. Thankfully nobody was seriously injured, and I got to see an urban geyser. http://bit.ly/bu5Tk #
- I wonder if Apple lets artists pay to get played more frequently in the iTunes Genius mixes and playlists? #
- Back of the envelope: ~50 m^3 of water was wasted by that broken hydrant = ~8 lbs beef = 1 BBQ <= last night's dumpster diving haul. #
- Outlined data structures for geographic superposition networks, now on to pseudocode algorithm for DAG enforcement, & stratigraphic sorting. #
- Wikipedia has improved dramatically since I last worked on graph theory. #
- Seems absurd that it took all day to write 15 lines of code, but using osgeo and networkx I can now take a map and turn it into a graph. #
- It's a sad morning inbox that contains nothing but a bunch of notifications of backups, successfully completed. At least my data loves me. #
- Why on Earth do all of the geographic processing libraries act like the world is flat? I am so tired of hacking in Euclidean space! #
Twitterfeed
- Heading out to do some grocery shopping on this glorious day that doesn't feel like February. 1 week ago
- Gonna bike down to Superior… to get my teeth cleaned. 1 week ago
- Listened to This American Life's Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory after buying a new computer. Orwell/Gibson weird. http://t.co/MElu4BQZ 1 week ago
- I seem to have gotten myself a new computer for my birthday. I'll have a 13" MBP+24" Apple display for sale here soon… $1200 w/ 6mo warranty 1 week ago
- I'm older than I've ever been, and now I'm even older. And now I'm even older. And now I'm even older. 1 week ago
Linkstream
- Teaching Good Sex:
A Quaker prep school in Pennsylvania has a novel approach to sex education: it's co-ed, respectful of the students, and sex-positive. The full semester of curriculum almost makes you think that the school wants the kids to have good sex -- safe, emotionally fulfilling, and pleasurable -- when they're ready, and no sooner. What an idea. I knew I liked something about the Society of Friends.... - Fox on grad students in climate science:
An open letter to Donna Laframboise, who's just written a book entitled "The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert," about how mere graduate students have given input to and even played leadership roles within the UN's IPCC process. Shock. Horror.... - To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees:
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees. So many PhD advisors are so bad at academic and career advising, that there's now a cash market for consultants who will do their job for them. Paid by graduate students of course.... - Area Woman Excited To Finally Experience Unbearable Loneliness Of Having Her Own Place:
Area Woman Excited To Finally Experience Unbearable Loneliness Of Having Her Own Place. This is, thankfully, not a problem we have here at Masala.... - The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse:
BusinessWeek on the End of Mail. Honestly, I can't wait for the USPS to collapse. It's a garbage delivery service as far as I can tell, and it sounds like virtually all of their plans for pulling out of the dive are related to serving that industry better. FedEx and UPS kill them on parcels, and real, personal mail is so rare these days I don't think I'd even notice if it vanished.... - Scientific Process Rage:
Scientific Process Rage. Science doesn't work like in the movies. In reality, there's a lot more cursing and crying.... - The PhD factory:
Nature notes that the world is producing more PHDs than ever before. And asks it time to stop? Graduate education isn't like a pyramid scheme, it is a pyramid scheme. And like all such schemes, it will eventually end in ruin for most of the participants. Something has to change. Why not sooner, and pro-actively, rather than later and in shambles?... - Tarsnap - Online backups for the paranoid:
Tarsnap looks like a good offsite backup option, if you're afraid of snoops and spooks and gagged subpoenas, but not of the Unix command line. Spideroak looks like a more user friendly application with the same zero-knowledge ethic.... - Ecstasy does not wreck the mind:
A Harvard Medical School study designed to address the shortcomings of earlier research was unable to detect any long term negative effects in MDMA users. The main difference in the new study was that both the control and user populations were all-night ravers -- some straightedge, and some not, and the ones using, using only MDMA. The results suggest that previous studies were observing the negative effects of all-night dancing, dehydration and sleep deprivation... not MDMA! Full article hid... - Yahoo! is De-rezzing:
Where does the data go when the host dies? Yahoo is coming apart at the seams, and they're taking the social bookmarking site Delicious with them. I use this service to generate the linkstream in my sidebar here. Thankfully, I've had WordPress importing all that content weekly for a long time, so I'm not in danger of losing any information. I just have to deal with the pain in the ass of figuring out a new way to implement this functionality. If you care about information you must be constan...
- Teaching Good Sex:
