Author: Zane Selvans

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

Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2009-08-17

  • Do you think bicyclists should be represented on CA Traffic Control Devices Committee? Tell Devinder.Singh@dot.ca.gov http://bit.ly/rairw #
  • T-60 days and counting. (The T is for Thesis) #
  • New Belgium's Tour de Fat almost makes me wish I had a car, just so I could trade it in for a bike, faith-healer style: http://bit.ly/2Ypkl #
  • nodding off. must. brush. teeth…. #
  • It's funny to realize that despite having been to someone's house dozens of times, over years, you have no idea what their address is. #
  • Just reported four people for running their lawn sprinklers in the heat of the day. Does that make me a prick? http://bit.ly/1w4mel #
  • Got my Hunter S. Thompson Freak Power! shirt. I can't believe he was almost the Sheriff of Aspen. http://bit.ly/TbCDx #
  • I would surrender, if only it would make the endlessly circling police helicopters go away. But they don't want me. (yet) #
  • There are only so many lucid hours in the day. They begin now. #
  • Who would have thought Caltrans could be so personable and responsive? http://bit.ly/g9fD1 #
  • Have had to restore information from backups twice today. Thank goodness for SVN and Time Machine. #
  • Surprisingly satisfying to start putting words and figures into a file called Thesis.ltx #
  • Went to bed at midnight, still didn't wake up until 10:30am. What's wrong with me? #
  • Stay out of Malibu, Lebowski! Point Dume State Beach may be slated for closure, under pressure from the rich & famous. http://bit.ly/1sBk6y #
  • Vastly more people have played The Oregon Trail than ever emigrated via the Oregon Trail. What a fascinating modern age it is we live in. #
  • Thank you California for legalizing sensible graywater systems. Now that wasn't so painful really, was it? http://bit.ly/32n8aB #
  • I feel silly (and good) for missing @michelleselvans after only 4 days. #
  • Time to hitch up the trailer and go foraging. #
  • Tonight it was berry season: blue, black and rasp. Pounds of them. Plus eggs (of course), grapes, chicken salad, apples and a bit o cheese #
  • might be as much a non-theist Quaker as a freegan. Definitions-wise anyway. Community participation obviously makes a difference though. #
  • Honestly, the way grad students act and feel about never having been doing enough work is downright Catholic. #
  • I am a digital pack rat, but I think my grandkids and the family AI will probably appreciate it: http://bit.ly/MDYi8 #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2009-08-09

  • A graphical plea for pedestrians, bicycles, and mass transit… but no cars in our cities: http://is.gd/20R4f #
  • Apparently there will be no further public Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan meetings: http://is.gd/21jmS (unless we make a stink about it!) #
  • Not a big fan of muckraking journalism, but occasionally it works. #
  • OH in Caltech Seismolab stairs: "Richter and Gutenberg came up with the Richter scale. It's a mathematical formula."; "Huh, that figures." #
  • 16 years after donating blood while I unknowingly had mononucleosis, the Red Cross still doesn't want me. That's ~50 liters of lost blood. #
  • Some part of me will be sad if the era of human spaceflight ends in my lifetime, and I never went to see a launch. #
  • Had a gourmet dumpster brunch: french toast w/ bread from EuroPane, eggs from TJs, jelly made from backyard kumquats. #
  • When I start to work, suddenly I always have to go pee. Then I have to put on my headphones. It just isn't work without the headphones. #
  • Today's iPhones are 20,000 times more powerful than the computer used to do the fluid dynamics calculations for the first hydrogen bomb. #
  • http://img.ly/2lT South Mudd is such a great place to watch sunsets. #
  • RT @bikeportland Detroit radio show hosts encourage listeners to throw things at people on bikes as they drive by. http://bit.ly/17Hkli #
  • Apprehensive about (terrified of?) giving my PhD committee some kind of update, but it has to be done. #
  • Mmm, chickenfat. #
  • Sometimes when I look at things I did or wrote very late at night, it's almost like looking at some other person's work. Some stupid person. #
  • #whentwitterwasdown I mixed up a go-to-sleep-before-dawn potion of sake and strawberry lemonade. Heading to JPL early tomorrow morning. #
  • New Matplotlib release v0.99.0 http://bit.ly/1HQlaf now with 3D plotting! Seems to be asymptotically approaching v1.0. #
  • The ride up to JPL and back is so nice. If only working there wasn't so governmentally obnoxious. #
  • Heading down to Little Tokyo for some free Taiko… to be followed by a midnight bike ride back to Pasadena. #
  • Taiko was awesome. Scoped some dumpsters on the way home. Cool summer evenings are the best for riding LA to Pasadena. #
  • Am I really a freegan? Would I really want to be? One word labels are so confining. http://bit.ly/EcpVv #
  • Got distracted on the way to the hummus by the fresh pesto, bread, tomatoes, basil, and balsamic. Oh well. #
  • Uh oh. Getting light outside. It must be bedtime. http://bit.ly/lUxcN #
  • Selling my old laptop. $100 discount and a free laptop case if I know you and you can pick it up: http://bit.ly/Qh1OS #
  • Starting to work in the afternoon on a Sunday reminds me of being an undergrad. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2009-08-03

  • It is by will alone I put my mind in motion. #
  • It seems as if one could be arbitrarily well fed dumpster diving: http://is.gd/1PhME #
  • A golden age of propaganda is upon us I say: http://manhattanairport.org/ #
  • Glad to once again have a positive net worth. Bummed the global economy is still organized like a massive Ponzi scheme. #
  • Just downloaded thesis.cls from CU Graduate School… #
  • Bleah. Heuristics are so easy to get wrong. Or at least, not quite right. #
  • my new Turing clone is almost finished. #
  • Annoying that Apple's Time Machine doesn't let you swap out your backup disk or laptop easily. #
  • Going to sleep. I have a date in the morning. #
  • I name all my backup disks after burial structures. My new one will be Dakhma: a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence. http://is.gd/1UMEl #
  • Voicemail instructions are a billion dollar scam (who doesn't know what to do with the beep?) http://is.gd/1UP6K #
  • watching a decade of my life quite literally flash before my eyes. #
  • Can I fall asleep before the sun wakes up? #
  • OCR: for Europa tidal stresses are insensitive both to the theological structure beneath the ice layer and to the thickness of the icy shell #
  • Not doing anything worth taking a picture of. #
  • Just saw Food Inc. I figure, if we're going to eat trash, it might as well actually come out of a dumpster. #
Categories
journal

Colorado Dreaming and the Two Body Problem

While we were both in Colorado last winter, Michelle and I talked a lot about the emotional and physical logistics of moving back there permanently.  Our two body problem.  Location, career or love, (like sleep, good grades or a social life): pick two.  We tried to write an outline of all the decision points we might face.  A decision tree.  It became a mess.  Then we started writing it as a Python program, with zane and michelle objects, and method calls like zane.findjob(loc="boulder").  But it’s not really that kind of problem.  It’s not deterministic.  This is decision making under uncertainty.  Strategic and emotional, not entirely susceptible to reason.  It really stopped being an academic problem when I got the interview with NREL, and it seemed to go well.  Even if I don’t get the job (they still haven’t said one way or the other, as of mid February August), it was certainly a useful exercise in the sense that It made us think and feel through the realities of what doing something like that would mean.

Continue reading “Colorado Dreaming and the Two Body Problem”
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2009-07-27

  • Knowing humanity is capable of greatness makes our stubborn bickering mediocrity so much more tragic. Apollo trapped in a monkey's mind. #
  • From the moon, it's a full earth. #
  • Paper draft finally handed off for first direct outside input in quite a while. Mmm, beer at dawn. It's thesis time… #
  • Figures lie and liars figure. I think I'll start with the captions. #
  • Like it or not, there are values embedded in the way we convey facts: http://is.gd/1JnkV #
  • Working on Saturday. EIther that, or I wrote a cron job to update my status… #
  • RT @AlexSteffen: More Americans are killed by cars when walking or biking than die b/c of drug overdoses & violence. #
  • When the revolution comes, we will be ready, with our metric units intuition… #
  • Heading to the dumpsters. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2009-07-20

  • The mildly depressed make more accurate assessments. #
  • Sadly, my camera seems to have either been lost or stolen. #
  • I had no idea I was supposed to talk to Caltrans about http://bikewise.org this morning! Gah! #
  • Good day+night of paper/thesis writing. It's like a story (well… kinda). Now time for a sleep inducing beer, blindfold, and earplugs. #
  • If I don't find my lost/stolen camera in the next couple of weeks… suggestions? Thinking a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3: http://is.gd/1zBEP #
  • That wasn't quite enough sleep. Or quite enough tea. How to tell which? #
  • Europa TPW/NSR paper at 55 pages double spaced, including figs. Time for the sustainability symposium. This week's topic is @wattzon #
  • Will remember 2009 as the first year we actually got the tomatoes to work. So many we have to give some away. #
  • Do you know where your Pareto frontier is in Salary-Vacation space? http://is.gd/1Bjmy #
  • How did I spend all day writing, but only go from 55 to 57 pages? I guess that's what editing does. #
  • Publisher got Amazon to forcibly delete their legally purchased e-books from all Kindles. What book? 1984. Double plus ungood irony. #
  • I ordered a new camera, and the lost camera mysteriously reappeared within minutes. Weird B&H Photo conspiracy? Except it's the sabbath. #
  • Writing conclusions. Who could have guessed there were so many ways to generate the same observations? #
  • 83 days until I have to submit my thesis. Ugh. #
Categories
journal

Spinning Europa 1: Introduction

Aaron suggested that my paper would would be much better if it read more like one of my blog posts, and less like a litany of torture lab notebook.  So here it is in parts, written as if I intended for you, dear reader, to read it.  (But don’t worry Bob, I’m actually working on the real paper).  It’ll probably be cathartic, as one of the things I hate about writing papers is the formalistic language.  It makes the content less readable, less enjoyable, less human.  I just don’t see the point.  If the content is up here, then anyone who feels the same way can get an idea of what’s going on without wading through all the passive voice crap.  It’ll also help me enjoy writing it, and let me feel like I got it out of my system.  Plus, on the internet, color figures are free (not $350 for the first page, $175 for each additional page… I mean jeez, that’s like a year’s worth of hosting fees just for one paper), you can insert links, and nobody has to pay $3975 per year for a subscription.  Oh, and sweet, I also get to retain the copyright.  Honestly, paper journals are so sad.  Of course there’s that pesky peer review, but you’ll find a comment form at the bottom of the page, and if you actually make it that far, by all means let me know what you think.  In a production environment, the publication would be hosted on a neutral third party site, precluding me from editing or deleting comments, verifying everybody’s identities, and ensuring that the content was archived effectively.  Alas, we’re not there yet.  Maybe this will seem ridiculous at this point in the grad school experience, but I actually maybe for the first time understand why someone would want to give a talk.  I have results, they’re interesting (if you’re into this kind of thing), but I don’t really know what they mean.

Continue reading “Spinning Europa 1: Introduction”
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of 2009-07-13

  • Whoa, LA Metro considering lifting rush-hour bike ban on light rail. Voice your support! http://is.gd/1p2vy #
  • Going to Trader Joe's… this time for stuff they haven't thrown away yet. #
  • Riots, hundreds dead, burning buses and looted businesses. This is Xinjiang, not Iran: http://is.gd/1qfrX #
  • Emerged from my improvised home sensory deprivation chamber. True Roman bread for true Romans! #
  • I love the irony of having the wallpaper on my laptop be a piece of weathered parchment or papyrus. #
  • Has humanity really learned anything new about government in the last 2000 years? Sometimes I doubt it. #
  • Writing something you wouldn't want to read is frustrating. #
  • Maybe this is cheesy, but I feel kind of inspired by Artichoke's songs about 26 scientists: http://is.gd/1v3cy and http://is.gd/1v3db #
  • Soon to be burning the midnight oil. It's been a while. Thank goodness for thumping trance beats. #
  • Holy crap, I am older than more than half the human beings on earth. #
  • I've been sitting here for more than 12 hours. Time to sleep. #
  • Even the internet is quiet on weekends. #
  • Are you a scientist frustrated by programming? Check out Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/ #
Categories
tweets

This week in tweets

  • Would somebody please catch Senator Inhofe (R-OK) having a homosexual extramarital affair already? http://is.gd/1ipLM and http://is.gd/1ipHx #
  • RT @ceidotorg They call it peer review. We call it censorship. http://is.gd/1ir0J #
  • feels like a nuclear powered sleep zombie. #
  • Tired of being social. Tired of being tired. Tired of being tired of being social? Stressed? Introverted? Crazy? #
  • The Cynics were wise-asses too, and old Zeno they liked to refute. Don't think too hard when you move, 'cause it makes it much harder to do. #
  • I can only love the God that does not care. #
  • Another nuclear dawn patrol… #
  • Go / where you wanna go / but know as you leave that / no-body ever gets / where they're goin' to… #
  • Amateur Earthling says: no nukes is good nukes! Or is they? http://is.gd/1lTZt (A Review of Nuclear Energy by David Bodansky) #
  • I don't even really have to write anything here now do I? #
  • Replacing explosive patriotism with a harvest celebration. #
  • I really don't want a revolution. I also really don't want an apocalypse. #
  • searching for suspicious things on the internets. Don't worry coppers, I really meant it when I said I didn't want a revolution. #
  • No, I don't have an Adventure Pass, I didn't drive. No I wasn't dropped off. Yes, I biked all the way from the city. All 3 miles! #
  • Watch "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" if you want to see what a mess trying to run an insurgency is… #
  • I just pulled a week's worth of food out of a Trader Joe's dumpster. What are we doing? http://is.gd/1oAMF #
Categories
tweets

This week in tweets

  • napping on soft grass in the shade of an aspen grove just leafing out at 3000m on summer solstice is very close to heaven. #
  • viewing the garden after a long weekend away is always an adventure… #
  • Uh, note to potential vertical (urban highrise) farmers: where exactly are you going to get the sunlight from again? http://is.gd/1blxV #
  • Show support for democracy in Iran add green overlay to your Twitter avatar with 1-click – http://helpiranelection.com/ #
  • People of Earth: talk to the hand. #
  • eating pasta with crispedy crunchedy castaño beans from the garden, lightly sauteéd. #
  • I'm starting to wonder if anything sensible has ever been effectively legislated anywhere. #
  • enjoying finding old ideas in new media. Like running into an old friend, in a new city. #
  • Waltz with Bashir was strange and heavy and painful. #
  • coal left in the ground is by far the best option for carbon sequestration. #
  • RT @AlexSteffen: Some days, it's good to remember that optimism is a political act. #
  • Sliding toward dawn… #
  • The sound of ice cubes in a quart jar. Summer is finally here. #
  • Fourth annual Parkwood shadecloth raising is complete. It's BBQ season! #
  • Ate a shady lunch in our makeshift courtyard, all food harvested from the garden, or gleaned from society's waste stream. #
  • There's no place like "away": http://is.gd/1gA2j #