Author: Zane Selvans

A former space explorer, now marooned on a beautiful, dying world.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of October 19th, 2009

  • Geological superposition networks (GSNs) appear to support steady-state lineament formation, activity, visibility, quiescence, and erasure. #
  • The Sleeper has awoken. #
  • New Surgeon General's Warning: sleep deprivation/use of hallucinagens while mapping fuzzy pictures of squiggly lines may degrade accuracy. #
  • Is it easier to just be yourself all the time, or is it just a different kind of difficult? #
  • Is it just me, or does all innovation happen in the shower, on a bike ride, or while talking to somebody else? #
  • We want railroads and fiber, not tulips and exurbs. #
  • Eight hours was, as it turns out, a grotesque underestimate. #
  • OMG, now we're really in the future. Magnetic monopoles have been found, in spin ice. (don't worry, it barely makes any sense to me either) #
  • Again with the thinking in the shower. Maybe I should bathe more often… #
  • I cannot stop the thumping trance. I kill-dash-nined iTunes 15 minutes ago, and it's still playing. Guess the lappy just wants to dance! #
  • Coding seems downright recreational compared to mapping. #
  • not even 10am, and all my errands are done… #
  • Had an eye exam. Lens price mysteriously increased by $100. Mail order without insurance is cheaper than Target with it. Lame. #
  • Somebody's banging on a djembe upstairs. #
  • How am I already getting up at 4pm again? #
  • It makes me sad how closed the world's borders are. #
  • Definitely missing my ergonomic chair. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of October 12th, 2009

  • I wish bike shops would let you schedule same-day service, or had decent loaners (or even rentals) you could use. #
  • Losing a day's work to mysterious data corruption shouldn't be this demoralizing, but honestly, I feel like my computer betrayed me. #
  • T-minus 31 days and counting. #
  • The Democrats are going to rubber-stamp renew the Patriot Act? Who says we have a multi-party govt? Or a free press? http://bit.ly/1wrhS7 #
  • Atoms for peace! (nuclei for war) #
  • carpel tunneling / haven't clicked this much in years / end the mapping please! #
  • I am more than happy to be fielding questions from grad students who are trying to use my code. It makes me feel loved. Well, kinda… #
  • I got a ton of stuff done today. Somehow it never seems like enough. Now I should seriously go to sleep. #
  • This cannot be over soon enough. Except that, of course, I feel like I need more time. Go figure. #
  • "Taxi to the Dark Side" (about US torture/interrogation) was much better than "Standard Operating Procedure". Still dark, but less spun. #
  • Woke up at 4:30am. Can't we outsource scientific data entry to India or something? #
  • I'm, dreaming of a, white, Columbus Day… #
  • I'm inspired by events to remember the exits in back of me… #
  • Dang, PCC teaches Spanish, Arabic, Russian *and* Chinese. Next year will be fun. #
  • Four different greeting cards for National Coming Out Day: http://bit.ly/3PQjHz #
  • Damian Martinez, wherever you are, thank you for coming out at Blacker dinner 16 years ago today. It took courage, and I think it did good. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of October 4th, 2009

  • Not only can I not concentrate, I also can't sleep. #
  • How Boulder became bikeable. This is at least half the reason I want to live there: http://bit.ly/XwZV8 (video by Bikes Belong) #
  • qGIS 1.3.0 is named after one of Saturn's moons (Mimas), and it's not crashing on my computer. That's good. #
  • I'm so tired of hating the world. #
  • Getting extraterrestrial GIS working always takes too long. It's like they think the Earth is the center of the universe or something. #
  • Tomorrow, I am for to be mapping some tectonics of the ices. Again. For the third time. #
  • Carl Sagan: "The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars." Talk about a big 'if'… #
  • I really don't look forward to coffee any more. #
  • I wish I could make an update about something more personal than the geospatial databases which are giving me a headache., but I can't. #
  • Two interplanetary exploration show-stoppers: Pu-238 RTGs http://bit.ly/8s584 and DSN bandwidth http://bit.ly/18t2wh #
  • Back to mapping, and the land of the living… right after I get some coffee. #
  • Snow returning to Siberia; Europe & the Niger delta twinkling in a thin sliver of moonless night; southern ocean vortices: I see you, Earth. #
  • I remind me of an asshole. #
  • Okay, I'm getting dizzy from the lineaments now. Maybe that's enough for now. #
  • If the Earth had an intelligence agency, I would totally interview with them. #
  • I knew there was some reason I kept putting off mapping. These overalls have never felt this loose before. #
  • "Accidentally" spiced everyone out at dinner with bean sprouts+chiles+garlic. #
  • More than 1000 intersections to classify, at 30 seconds each that's… still 8+ mind-numbing hours. Ugh. #
  • Huh, I wonder where all that mapping I did earlier today went. *poof* ERROR, ERROR, ERROR. p.o.s. 🙁 #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of September 28th, 2009

  • Got closer on the entropy problem. Also have much, much better autogenerated network diagrams. Still need to make a real intersection map. #
  • Fuck entropy. I choose you, N-choose-2. #
  • Come with us to where man has never been, but to where he will go as certain as the passage of time. Come with us to the moon. The rocket… #
  • No more research until Saturday. Now on to packing and shipping, making presentation slides, flying, practicing. But first: some sleeping. #
  • Instead of putting me on hold, Southwest's system asked for my phone number and called me back when it was my turn. I love Southwest. #
  • The only key left on my keychain goes to my bike lock. #
  • Bike is boxed. Hands blackened and bloodied as always. I hate packing it, and it hates being packed. We'll miss each other in transit. #
  • Working on a presentation on an airplane. I feel so… professional. Or something. #
  • Back at Chez Stempel in Lakewood. I like having parents I can borrow occasionally. #
  • A liter of coffee on the desk at 10pm. It's going to be a long night. #
  • naptime. #
  • Fitter. Healthier. More Productive… #
  • So much for trusting my bits to Google. Gmail down again. Will reconsider my whole hosting setup in January. #
  • It's so early, and yet, so so late. #
  • Are you ready to ruuuuuuummmmmble!?!?! #
  • As expected, that went better than expected. (Expectation is the mother of disappointment, so I try to keep mine low.) #
  • To my many half blind friends: how much should an eye exam and prescription cost if you pay cash? (glasses exam/Rx, no contacts). #
  • Stayed at Julie's too late talking. Now have to sleep in Boulder. I don't have a problem with her couch. It's more like a relationship. #
  • Back in Lakewood. Need to make up a writing schedule for myself, and re-assemble my bike! #
  • Probably not the best idea to antagonize someone on my thesis committee over minutia, but actually it encourages me to do a good job. #
  • Only obvious FedEx casualty is a smashed taillight. Thankfully whatever poked the big hole in the monitor box was harmless. #
  • Apparently I needed to catch up on some sleeping last night… #
  • Finding it very difficult to concentrate, and feeling angry about it. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of September 21st, 2009

  • Just FYI, the next person who congratulates me on having a PhD defense date runs the risk of being punched in the face. #
  • Trying to feel good about making a bunch of progress on the stratigraphic sorting. #
  • And then every so often I'm like, "Maybe I could enjoy a being Postdoc, given a sufficiently long vacation first." #
  • Okay, enough of this nonsense. I'm going home. Right after I pilfer some toilet paper… #
  • I'd much rather get a partnership out of my PhD, than a PhD out of my partnership. #
  • I have a bunch of good day-old ciabatta bread in my office, if anybody wants some. #
  • Mmmm, PB&J. Mike would be proud. (Or jealous…) #
  • Sacrificing the ornamental plants in the courtyard to the Ice Queen Europa. #
  • Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan Meeting 6:30-8:30pm, October 1st at 1020 N. Fair Oaks Ave. More details here: http://bit.ly/USQYY #
  • The Wall Street Journal just contacted me about being interviewed for an article about dumpster diving. What should I do? #
  • It's hard to believe that many of our grandparents (or even our parents!) remember a world before modern China existed: http://bit.ly/PvoB7 #
  • There's no food in my office, so what are these ants looking for? #
  • not sure what to think of being told I am too articulate and enlightened to be useful by a journalist from the WSJ. Compliment? Insult? #
  • either rationality *or* intelligibility would be a big improvement in our landlady. We can't even tell what kind of crazy she's talking. #
  • Trying to measure a reduction in entropy. As much as anything, I associate entropy with evil, and someday it will win, but not yet. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of September 13th, 2009

  • 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! #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of September 7th, 2009

  • Terrifying time lapse of Station Fire: http://vimeo.com/6341555 Mt. Wilson cam is all shadow, and flame: http://twitpic.com/fy9li #
  • I suppose technically this is the land of milk and honey. And also beta-phenyl-isopropylamine. #
  • The air outside is so bad it makes my eyes sting, and every street light has a bright yellow cone of haze beneath it. #
  • People are asking the UK government to apologize for the persecution of Alan Turing which led to his suicide http://bit.ly/R0D81 #
  • sleeping soon. #
  • Went grocery shopping, and on the way home down San Pasqual, saw more bikes than cars, including one with a skirt guard! #
  • Sign up to help do the first ever LA bicycle count, September 22nd and 23rd! http://bit.ly/20ao2R #
  • How much of a paper you aren't first author on can go into your thesis? #
  • Drinking two liters of tea seems so much less ridiculous than drinking half a gallon. #
  • Cost (to me) of student healthcare at CU has doubled since I entered grad school from $500 to $1000 per semester. #
  • Godspeed You Black Emperor goes great with forest fires. #
  • If nothing else, it seems assured that the Apocalypse will be well documented. Yet another fire timelapse: http://www.vimeo.com/6356422 #
  • My life always feels so boring an inhuman when I work like this. #
  • Publishing a scientific technique & releasing a buggy closed implementation effectively prohibits anyone from improving on your work. Lame! #
  • Only three weeks to my committee meeting?!? Feeling desperate. Also, I think I really need to brush my teeth. #
  • Seems absurd that the overwhelming majority of our roads, buildings, and other urban infrastructure is used only half of the time, or less. #
  • Pulled in and re-organized all my existing thesis content, except for the geological superposition networks stuff. 101 pages so far. #
  • Annoyed that I can't go to Caltrans BAC mtg to evangelize http://bikewise.org b/c of my PhD committee mtg. Same day & time, different state. #
  • AGU abstract functionally done. Going to reward myself by upgrading my OS. At least, I hope it ends up being a reward. #
  • Installing a bunch of crap from source makes me feel kind of nostalgic. Nostalgic for what I'm not sure. Maybe for a time before computers. #
  • python 2.6 + ipython + readline + snow leopard == 🙁 #
  • nobody should die because they can't afford the longevity treatments, and nobody should go broke because they got old http://bit.ly/Up79x #
  • Sometimes it's just best to lie to the computer outright. #
  • It's amazing what a decent table of contents will do for the soul. #
  • And that's all the phase there is to shift. #
  • Are babies had or made? Do we give or lose our virginity? I vote for making and giving. #
  • Being nocturnal feels like living in some kind of weird, silent, de-populated world. #
  • It's phenomenal that our oldest genes are about as durable as the oldest whole rocks on Earth, but have passed through billions of bodies. #
  • tonight, I will finish the introduction and background section. #
  • I gave myself a haircut, making my beard by far the longest hair on my head. Now I look like some kind of villain from Imperial Russia. #
  • Need spicy noodles, and a "nap". Got bogged down in crater counting and it's weaknesses in the outer solar system… #
  • We can all vote tomorrow to suspend gravity, but we'll still be gravity's bitch. http://bit.ly/ZRY1s #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of August 30th, 2009

  • The blindering continues: unfollowing all non-personal Twitter contacts until 2010, after my PhD is done. #
  • I know, this shouldn't seem strange, but I'm actually looking forward to going to AGU. #
  • Petitioning CU for my fall registration (email has been in my inbox since… May 4th) and writing my AGU abstract. #
  • I'm not completely trustworthy. The weird thing is, I feel compelled to tell people that up front. Sometimes. #
  • I wish it was really possible for headphones to do bass well. #
  • 1 liter smoothie + 1 liter tea = too much liquid for breakfast. Solution? Make smoothie w/ iced tea instead of juice! Fruity stimulation. #
  • Somehow having 1000+ unread RSS feed items makes it so much easier to just ignore them all. #
  • both disgusted by and enamored with homemade baconfat tostada shells. #
  • we will change the world, whether we want to or not. #
  • Did I just find that bug, or create it? Bedtime. #
  • Looking forward to our crazy landlady's first visit in years tomorrow! Not. #
  • wrote a script to chain together all my accumulated analysis so far… letting it slog through the morning. Now sleep, and await the heat. #
  • You have done well my silicon minions. You do not know fear! You do not know pain! You will taste manflesh! #
  • Landlady was contacted by insurance co. (not City). Has less idea what's going on than we do. This one, maybe I fix. #
  • Michelle has actually aged since we met. It's comforting and disturbing at the same time. #
  • Wrote a thesis todo list. I'm sure it's incomplete, but I'm going to have a pint of cider anyway. #
  • vote for bike trails and directions in Google Maps! http://bit.ly/1FWgoL #
  • It almost looks like Brown Mountain has turned into a volcano. #
  • It almost looks like Brown Mountain has turned into a volcano: http://bit.ly/ULqY2 #
  • good overview of bicycle health and safety statistics (helmets, accidents, obesity, etc): http://bit.ly/3duRn3 #
  • I hope it's possible for poor employees to be good business owners. #
  • I made fresh pesto from the garden. Eating some with polenta that I cooked in my big insulated french press. #
  • Economists talk about the price of anarchy. I think what Popper is talking about is the price of order. Efficiency instead of resilience. #
  • Thyrsus is definitely my new favorite word: http://bit.ly/16V1fA #
  • I may just have to ship my laptop out to Colorado separately, to avoid the possibility of any digital body cavity searches by the TSA. #
  • maxing out both cores, all 4GB of memory in use, and I have the gall to be annoyed that my music is skipping. #
  • I can't believe I've been sitting here for 13 hours. #
  • Feeling strangely fascinated by the prospect of friending all my cousins in Fresno on FB. #
  • going to go eat dinner on the roof and watch Mount Wilson burn. #
Categories
journal

Amateur Earthling on Hiatus

I have lots of draft posts in progress here on the back end, calling to me whenever I log in like internet sirens:

  • The Scale and Form of Cities, about how one might design a city from the ground up today, with efficient resource utilization and conviviality in mind.  A follow up to What Are Cities For?
  • Corporate Paternalism, about the ways in which we (especially conservatives) seem to have more faith in corporations than our elected representatives when it comes to making decisions for us.
  • Our Newtonian Hangover, about the non-linear, non-deterministic nature of history and technology, and James Burke’s excellent BBC series The Day the Universe Changed and Connections.  Miraculously, they are almost as relevant today as they were 30 years ago, and we are in the process of implementing one of the strange futures he foretold.
  • The dunes told me to work on passive buildings, which is a more personal and spiritual response to the NREL interview questions than seemed appropriate for a job interview.
  • and a magnum opus entitled What’s Wrong With Graduate School, that examines both how my own graduate career has been uniquely flawed, why I believe the graduate education system as a whole is in general broken, and a vision of what I think higher education might look like by the time any offspring I could conceivably have would be there.

However, at the moment the thing most wrong with graduate school is that I’m still in it.  My PhD defense has been tentatively scheduled for November 20th, and I’m going to the AGU fall meeting in San Francisco in mid-December to present my work, so I’m going to be completely occupied until the beginning of 2010.  There will be no further blog updates between now and then.  Or at least, there shouldn’t be.  If you see me making posts, don’t read them.  Instead ridicule me in person, or offer up some kind of digital castigation.

Of course, you can still read my mind keep in touch with me via my linkstream, my tweets, and my photos.  Oh, and of course there’s always e-mail and the telephone.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of August 24th, 2009

  • Early to bed, early to rise actually feels kinda nice. But also totally abnormal. #
  • Got my 30 inch display back from Apple service. Somehow they got a white thread sandwiched into the LCD. *sigh* http://flic.kr/p/6QdXCr #
  • Your latest song is leaked as a torrent, what do you do? If you're Radiohead, you capitalize on the free publicity: http://bit.ly/tKrN2 #
  • Okay I give in, I'll do the golden section search thing. #
  • Interdisciplinary work in the natural sciences gets more citations. Curiously, this is not true in the social sciences: http://bit.ly/ZsvQk #
  • Trying to think only in vectors. And failing. #
  • Advocates of Neptune/Triton exploration are enlisting the youngest scientists, because of multi-decade planning and travel times. #longnow #
  • Must. Contact. Thesis. Committee. Now. #
  • I'm feeling computationally limited. #
  • Both vindicatied and annoyed that what I was doing before works just as well, and is like a bazillion times faster. #
  • Okay, today I'm totally going to contact my committee. For reals this time. #
  • Leaked memo from oil industry detailing their astroturf campaign against CO2 emission reductions, via Greenpeace: http://bit.ly/WCPqC #
  • I miss the worms, but they're in a better place now (SF). #
  • Wow, Pasadena water shortage violations carry up to a $1000 fine (for repeat offenders): http://bit.ly/OPbOZ #
  • Got editorial feedback from Aaron. He says of the paper "It's done, just kill it already!". Confidence for committee calling acquired. #
  • I hope AGU will let me submit an abstract for the fall meeting even though I paid my 2009 dues a day after the August 20th deadline… #
  • Okay okay. I. Did. It. Now hopefully there won't be any drama or fireworks. #
  • Need to organize a weekly foraging trip, with a variety of possible destinations so we don't end up burning any one of them out. #
  • I find myself with only half-caf coffee in the house. I suppose I'll just have to use twice as much. #
  • It's nice to spend an evening in thoughtful disagreement with someone. Probably better than mindless affirmation. #
  • The poorest humans spend 10 times as much on alcohol and prostitutes as on educating their children. Ah, men. http://bit.ly/23Xmv5 #
  • Bank that owns next door house called in our yard to CIty, who sent notice to wrong address, then we failed the 2nd inspection. Now what? #
  • Looks like I'll probably be defending Nov. 20th. #