Author: Zane Selvans

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

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tweets

This week in tweets

  • is not feeding a zombie bank. Instead, Zane is feeding a crazy chinese landlady in Fresno. #
  • cleaning the toilet. Yuck. #
  • I hate slow leaking flat tires. #
  • I am not a morning person. Understatement of the week. #
  • sshfs + rsnapshot + bluehost = cheap secure remote backups? Or am I missing something? #
  • feels bad about encouraging the facebook hegemony by broadcasting on these channels. #
  • is supposed to go home and help Michelle cook… and check on the microslaves. #
  • so how long until OCO’s functionality is launched again? #
  • wants to go backpacking in Bialowieza Puszcza, Europe’s last fairytale forest. #
  • Woo hoo! Cyclist body-checking NYPD officer fired, and facing 4 years in prison: http://is.gd/kr6n #
  • passing by Trader Joe’s on the way back to Parkwood. #
  • I never want to think about hardware again. #
  • Terry Tornek (running for Pasadena council district 7) doesn’t seem to understand traffic is caused by cars, not buildings. #
  • Attending a wake for the orbiting carbon observatory #
  • So much for “change” in the bank bailouts. Geithner is going to shovel cash at them without any hope of taxpayer upside: http://is.gd/kZOo #
  • The Earth really needs a dedicated, organized, long term monitoring system. We have no idea what’s happening. #
  • attending a moral salon. #
  • I refuse to wear pants. Rain follows the plough! #
  • If for some reason I was going to get a dog, I’d get a pariah dog. They’re just so, dog-like, without too much of our meddling. #
  • has a mental and monetary weakness for bicycles and computers. #
  • doing an interpretive dance… in my Results section. #
  • Have you changed your mind? http://is.gd/laUN #
  • Done reading for tonight (The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman). Enjoyed hanging out at Roosevelt, with a real Dane! Now to sleep. #
  • going the saturday morning muff, yet again. #
  • I need to go for a bike ride. #
  • Happy to see parking tickets being written at Chantry Flats. #
Categories
journal

Have you changed your mind?

This animation was inspired by an anti-drug poster, which showed two brain scans and the text “Have you changed your mind?”. Since the target audience was obviously not neuroscientists or brain surgeons, the only way to interpret it was based on the context, in which the connotation was presumably that one of the scans is a “damaged” drug-user’s brain, and the other is a healthy D.A.R.E. graduate.

Ironically, in a different context, the image becomes pro-drug. The word “psychedelic” is from the Greek roots psyche (mind) and delos (to manifest or become). Psychedelic means “mind-making”, or even, quite literally, “mind changing”. To those who have had positive, responsible, drug experiences, the poster might as well be channeling Jimi Hendrix: Are you experienced?

Made with the GIMP, and licensed to the public like all my content here, under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

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Categories
tweets

This week in tweets

  • Just remember kids: “All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” (unless you have a seismometer…) #
  • lots of notes from the pasadena bike master plan workshop: http://is.gd/k4l6 #
  • long story short: Kyoto Protocol was an abject failure. #
  • is writing Ryan Snyder ryan@rsa.cc with my frequent destinations, and preferred and avoided routes for biking in Pasadena. #
  • a plague of bloggers upon thee, City of Pasadena Transportation Department! #
  • I found my W-2! It was accidentally mailed to some Crawford guy at Caltech. #
  • US markets back to where they were in 2002, & 1997. Ah, the nostalgia! At least we’ll always have dividends & capital gains distributions. #
  • I am totally that sketchy communist Facebook Friend FOX is warning you about: http://is.gd/kaQG #
  • I like that the web as a whole has a version number. We should vote on when to increment it. Web 2.0.1 anybody? #
  • Caught up on sleep and still tired. #
  • continuing to indulge my noodle kick #
  • Incredibly, the Netherlands spends only $6 per capita annually on bicycle infrastructure. Even more incredibly, California spends $0.18. #
  • Whoops I’m wrong! Make that $18/person/year in Amsterdam! #
  • Made some great, dark bread. Still can’t predict how it will turn out reliably. #
  • not getting tired fast enough #
  • watching new photos upload at a *blazing* 17KB/sec. OMG America, when will we get fiber to the curb? I thought we were a “developed” nation? #
  • practicing tax evasion through voluntary poverty. #
  • listening to Chiral’s album, the Ill Tempered Cyclotron #
  • $2.50/person/month for all the sex you want with no babies is really a fantastic deal. #
  • Nothing like three hours of Apocalypse Now before bedtime. #
  • Annual per capita Caltrans budget: 100x what Amsterdam spends on bike infrastructure, which is 100x Caltrans per capita bike spending. #
  • Muggy hiking in Eaton Canyon. I guess it’s spring! #
  • All out of garbage bags. Time to go to Hawaii Supermarket! #
  • Altadena Food Fair, at New York and Allen, has very good olives for a scant 1/3 to 1/2 the price of Whole Foods. #
  • has billions of hard working slaves kneading my bread, synthesizing intoxicating substances, and souring my kraut. #
  • never, ever, feed a zombie bank. #
Categories
journal

Hiking Little Santa Anita Canyon to Orchard Camp

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journal

Snowshoeing to Boreas Pass

Two carloads worth of us headed up to Boreas Pass outside of Breckenridge, CO on New Years Day, for a mellow ski/snowshoe in to the Section House hut, about 6 miles in on an old mining railroad grade.  Along for the ride were Kamile Dilmurat, Trevor Stone, Stephen Hill, Michelle Selvans, Zane Selvans, Mike Stempel, Susan Stempel, Paul Stempel, and Megan Fluckiger.  We had some ominous but ultimately calm weather on the way in, and a gorgeous sunny day on the way out, with blustery wind all night long.  Kamile didn’t really sleep the night before, and had never been on such a trip, so she was pretty zonked.  Michelle was still getting over her winter break bug, whatever it was, and got kind of sick on the way out.  But other than that, I think everyone had a good time.  I’d definitely like to do more hut trips… with more snow, and a working knowledge of skiing!

The photos in the slideshow are a compilation from the cameras of Stephen, Trevor, and Zane, blatantly pirated for display here.

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journal

NREL Interview Questions and Answers

Career Goals.  Why work at NREL?

Why do you want to work at NREL?  Why do you want to work in Commercial Buildings in particular?  How does this job fit into your longer term career goals? Please take a look at this website for more information about the work done here at NREL in the commercial buildings area.

I believe that in the coming decades providing the plentiful energy which is currently synonymous with a high standard of living is likely to be a serious problem for humanity, and more generally for the terrestrial biosphere.  Today our energy is derived overwhelmingly from fossil fuels which are polluting, finite, unevenly distributed, and whose combustion is substantially altering the composition and optical properties of the Earth’s atmosphere.  Any one of those characteristics would be enough to cause grave concern.  Together they make significant change in our global energy systems imperative.  I want to be a part of that change.

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journal

Sketch of a Future Home

I pinged Norris Minnick and the Buyer Brokers of Boulder last week. Curious to know whether what we’re thinking of exists, and whether it’s economically possible.  And to get the desires written down. I don’t know how far in advance one ought to start looking, but I suspect it’s like getting a job and getting pregnant: don’t start trying unless you want it now.

Boulder has so far been able to avoid most of the recent boom, and most of the recent bust. The enforced geographic constraints on development and the relative affluence and desirability of the area probably help. This makes me suspect that getting a low interest rate is probably more important than trying to let the market “bottom”… who knows what it’s going to do. Modest living seems like the best insurance.

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journal

The Beatings Will Continue

Associate Dean Stevenson,

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Geological Sciences, researching two methods for inferring the temporal variability of tidally induced tectonic activity on the icy satellites of the outer solar system. I am petitioning for permission to register for an additional semester beyond the elapsed time limit of 6 years between matriculation and graduation which is imposed by the CU graduate school on PhD students. There are several reasons for my tardiness. Some were within my control, and others outside of it.

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journal

Movage or Digital Dark Age

This post on the Long Now blog, in combination with the recent discussions on the Cernio mailing lists regarding the Co-op’s financial disorganization have me thinking about the future of my (and our) data.  Data curation.  I have a responsibility to make it all portable, both for you, and for me.  A responsibility Blogger and Facebook and Apple do not sign up to, I might add.  But not all of the semantics are transferrable to other formats and systems.  So there will be loss.  Augh.  And learning.  Slow learning.  There are some times when going off on your own isn’t a good idea, and data management is one of them.  Unless it’s going to be your primary vocation, if the semantics you want don’t exist in a standardized way, you cannot build them.  You cannot impose them.  You have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up with your desires.

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journal

How I voted in 2008

I sent in my ballot on Saturday, after spending Friday evening discussing the propositions with a bunch of people over dinner at our house.  There seemed to be broad consensus on them, which isn’t too surprising, given that I avoided inviting people I thought I might disagree with.  I did that on purpose.  I wanted it to be an analysis of the questions at hand, not a personal policymaking session.  Ballotpedia had a lot of information on some of the propositions.  I’m guessing it will only improve in future elections, and I think the wiki model is actually close to being perfect for coming up with summaries of contentious political topics. Here’s how I ended up voting:

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