Mole Ratios

Hopography

2009-03-11T19:15:00.004-04:00

What's been keeping me busy lately? Unsurprisingly, it's a dorky website combining two of my interests: homebrewed beer and databases. Hopography is a homebrew logging website I made so I could keep track of what kinds of hops, malts and other ingredients went into my brews. I hope it will take off and help people improve their beers too; I know mine have been getting better...

Thanksgiving 2008

2008-11-30T13:02:00.006-05:00

::sighs::. The gravy is finally put away, mary's beautiful shiny knives are back up on our wall, and the end of a 4 day weekend is near. We cooked our Italian Turkey this year, just like last year, with a panceta-chestnut-ciabatta stuffing. Dinner included:
* Brined turkey (1 cup salt, 1 cup sugar, rosemary, lavender, thyme from the garden, soak for 2 days), meat massaged under the skin with herbs and olive oil before the roast. Gravy was standard, with all the sweatbreads finely diced and thrown in.
* Bechamel basil lasgana (which my dad stole almost all of when he took leftovers home)
* New Glaurus Red Ale (door county cherries) Cranberry sauce
* Ale Asylum Contorter Porter Pumpkin Pie (it called for only 1/2 a bottle, but 3/4 would have been even better!)
* Green Bean Cassarole (my dad's, but we got the recipe from the back of the fried onions at TJ's that Mary demoed)

We didn't have mashed potatoes, although we peeled enough to make them, from the sheer volume of other food.

We kept thanksgiving small this year. Monica had Rodey's mother & brother over, and we had my folks. The girls really seem to be stressed by the holiday family gatherings. Their holidays were always small, but there were always intermittent guests (POW's, etc.) Mary's family, who moved out to MA to be with Mary-Ann earlier in the fall, had Thanksgiving with her sister.

I haven't had a chance to breathe, let alone write, since Shelly left in June. I'm just now starting to get a system to take care of all the work that needs to be done in the lab. There are really 4 3/4 time jobs that I can figure out, and I need to be better about sharing them with people, although I've finally been able to train people on a few key tasks. Kris handles the extra systems stuff for me, Elisa handles the analyses, and Ken handles the programming. I still don't have anyone to do data management, keeping track of participants when they come in and making them available to people. I'm working on automated ways to do this with Ken, but it's still time-consuming. In terms of the lab work, it's a dirty job - not glamourous, kinda repetitive, subject to the whims of the timing of the computers, but yet still difficult and confusing. It requires a high degree of organization, which in turn requires focus. That I can't always give. I'm also surprisingly rather enjoying the web development, both for hopalicious and for the Scan App. It's hard to choose what to spend my time on, what I really want to do. I could imagine being good at development, at system work, at research, at graphing and playing with interfaces, computer psychology, memory and awareness. It's hard to talk about memory and awareness in the lab... It's hard to test at the level we're looking; sometimes I feel like we never really get memory in the way they do with aplasia studies, lesion studies, that kinda thing.

Well, I just wasted an hour and a half looking at uw graduate progrms (wisc & wash). So many possible directions to go...

Decency < Stank

2008-01-14T23:55:00.000-05:00

"Decency takes a back seat to stank. I have spoken." - Mary

The point...

2008-01-07T00:27:00.001-05:00

I feel like the proper time to invite friends over for dinner is right after the point they ask "why haven't you asked us over before? We should really do this more often!"

Heh heh

2007-12-02T10:54:00.001-05:00

Dec. 1st corresponded with the first real snow, and since we live right on a steep hill on a busy street, it's been hi-larious watching cars and busses try to climb up it. I just felt like announcing my schadenfreude to the world.

I also realized, while I was making Mary coffee this morning, that I especially like the sound of the coffee grinder when it's snowing. Maybe it's a kickback to when I would run downstairs Saturday mornings and watch two hours of cartoons and [ in the winter ] snowfall at dawn before my dad would come down and make himself some decaf coffee.

On the bus to work...

2007-10-02T10:45:00.000-04:00

I think it's one of life's little humors that the Livestock Laboratory on campus has a weber grill sitting right out in front of it.

Candy Irony of the Year: 2007

2007-08-26T12:01:00.000-04:00

Guofan has Chinese Hawthorn flavored candies (he's got several actually, some are cubes, some are flakes... all are delicious in the best of carcinogenic senses. The irony comes when you read the label of the "Happiness Brand" Haw Flakes, which advises us to "keep flakes away from sunshine." Heh heh heh...

The Move

2007-08-13T09:17:00.000-04:00

We're done moving! Huzzah! Our new place is very nice, only four or five blocks from Langdon but far enough to not get drunk-buzzed every Halloween. There's a lot more room, we have a Real dining room table and the kitchen is great. We're still unpacking all the fricken boxes, and deciding what to give away and get rid of. Work's going well, Donald also moved and we had a housewarming barbeque last Friday. I brought Rodey's recipe of marinated zucchini and squash from the garden.

The season has been good so far; we've had a very large and productive zucch that we bought as a seedling, (which just died, some little worms were living in all the stems) and our tomatoes, peas and beans have been very good. Our strawberries have been fighting the weeds all year (time to remulch), the potatoes got a little dry but they're still happy, and the sunflowers are about 8 feet high. I just put in another planting of peas last weekend, and it's time for more lettuce, kale and some cooler crops again. Plus, I'm going to rock the garlic. Where do I get bulbs...?

July: Cuetzala EWB

2007-07-31T09:03:00.000-04:00

July was an Engineers Without Borders trip to central Mexico. We got good work done, had amazing food and a great time. I'll write a little more about it later, but I wanted to put the link up first to a few of the pictures. Click on to get to the Picasa web gallery.

June

2007-06-30T09:12:00.000-04:00

Really, what I remember about June is that we made it to the city pool pretty much every weekend. I finished a bunch of Mary's Sherlock Holmes stories and ran around calling everything "elementary" until mid-July.

May

2007-05-30T09:07:00.000-04:00

May was the start of the eagle heights garden, got our first lettuce! Also, I think there were a few other posts hosted on my Dell computer which I turned into a Linux box (mythdora, for the bedroom) but had to reformat and lost. C'est la vie...

Samuel Johnson & James Bond

2007-04-30T12:44:00.000-04:00

Saw the new[est] Bond 007 movie on Friday night. I really have nothing to add besides Mary's take on it: "This movie was a perfect example of what happens when you ignore the Aristotelian unities of time, space, and plot. I have no idea how to react to this."

The movie was good, I think, but I have no idea what happened in those 2 1/2 hours.

The further I get from school the more I see how it held me.

2007-04-26T22:59:00.001-04:00

Zen Nostalgia

2007-04-26T22:19:00.000-04:00

How ironic. Every year for christmas I get a this Page-a-Day Zen calendar, where every new day has a few short sentences on enlightenment, or a nice idyllic poem or haiku. It's a tradition for my mom to get them for my dad and me since, well before I went away to college. It's also been a tradition for me to save the ones that really make an impact, taping them top to bottom to form immensely long paper rolls of quotes. It struck me today, after reading one of the quotes, how non-zen and materialistic this practice is. For the past couple of weeks I've been realizing just how tied to nostalgia, and specifically nostaligic things, I am. When Hannah came up to visit everyone came over and we played Hitler has Bad Gas, which, for lack of a better term, is a party game amounting to pictorial "Telephone." I'm sure that if I searched hard enough (and it probably wouldn't be too hard, knowing how specific I can be about storing things in their right places) I could find the scrolls from the last time she came to visit right after we first moved into the place.

On the one hand, I really like the collection of thoughts. They're interesting and powerful, maybe even mildly sublime, compiled like that. But on the other hand, their collection and bottling seems silly at best and hypocritical at worst. Most of what they say and mean leads to a continued rediscovery, not a single discovery, tape it to the wall, and never think about it again because it's always there. If I really understood them, I wouldn't keep them all neatly organized, in sight but out of mind. I mostly throw them away now after their day is done, but I still keep a few.

No Pants!

2007-03-25T23:14:00.000-04:00

It's officially the first day of the year too hot for long pants, and, according to the creepy frat next door also the first day of the year too hot for shirts. Ugh. I cannot wait until we move in August.

Life in the lab...

2007-02-28T22:23:00.000-05:00

Wow, this month went fast. Again. The lab goes well; I'm learning at about the pace of one key thing a day, which, if this rate keeps up, would be amazing. I have different tasks: image analysis, database stuff, running participants... I've long ago narrowed down my job criteria to a few things, most notably diversity and creativity. I know that I have to feel like my job is productive, and not boring. Which this one meets in leaps and bounds. It's tiring, and I think I make it a little more stressful than it really should be, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

One of the scan techs is going to Peru on vacation, so I've gone back to find Isabel and Ernesto
and all my old photos. How cool..

CG Berfday

2007-01-30T09:48:00.000-05:00

It is a snot-freezing morning here in Madison. I walked with Mary over the hill at Wisconsin Ave. to see the sun shining through the windows of the capital today before dropping her off at a very important interview with her fellowing prof, who, unlike the last one, is supposedly organized. Things are looking up for her. Happy Birthday Dip! We went to Sardine with her family this weekend to celebrate and had a great time, full of Curious George party favors and whoopy cushions (are they making fun of my monkeys?) but it always sucks when your birthday's on a Tuesday. Oh well, we'll live it up tonight!

Re: graduation

2006-12-29T13:30:00.001-05:00

My Tired Old Ass (which I soaked last night) wishes you and your hubby a Merry Christmas!

Your prezzy from the VmCS (that's right, I abbreviated it) arrived last night, and I immediately put it to good use. Ever since Christmas Mary and I have been doing nothing but sleeping and reading books and taking baths, in some kind of cyclical order, so it was easy to integrate that into my pattern... It's a perfect soak for my tired old ass, and thankfully I don't need to save any time with *just* a foot bath! Thanks!

Good god, graduation is done. It still hasn't hit me yet. It only hit Mary that her semester finished yesterday when we were walking along the street and I could see her mind trail off into thinking about all the crap that she has to do, but then she couldn't find anything. What a joyous occasion! Huzzah! Graduation itself was good, very big-state-school mechanized, but I don't mind too much. I finished and I'm outta there... I'm still not exactly sure what's going on with my job, but I think I'm starting around the 9th or the 15th of January. To tell you the truth, I'm not in too much of a hurry. This is 16 or 17 years worth of break that I'm doing right now, so I'm enjoying it while I can. :)

It may sound silly, but I'm looking forward to this job, and more specifically, leaving work at work. No more 3 AM papers... No more cramming for tests. Just getting my work done sounds like a nice break. Carolyn actually said it best in her graduation card when she congratulated me on finishing expectations, which I hadn't even realized I had.

The Liberation of Social Issues: Halliburton vs. Healthcare

2006-11-08T11:17:00.000-05:00

The dissociation between social and political views is finally coming apart; the republican populist story is being pried away from social issues like gay-marriage and the death penalty. Democrats in Wisconsin held onto the governorship, and took back both the State House and Senate. But, the same voters who elected them also choose in two referendums to make a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and to reenact the death penalty. Many democrats who supported the amendments were nonetheless elected.

Although I'm troubled by the institutionalized discrimination we've just voted into the constitution, I'm at least a little consoled by the fact that politically disastrous politicians can't hide behind social issues. I haven't heard a single mention of "values voters" in any news coverage I've seen or read. People realize that the political actions and laws of conservatives really aren't as compassionate as they claim to be; we're running a massive deficit but its not going to universal healthcare, it's going to halliburton.

2006-11-07T01:12:00.000-05:00

Current Away Message, for tomorrow's midterm election, from the Daily Show's coverage:

"Nothing's gonna keep me from renewing my term, not even dancing with a stripper, drunk and covered in sperm"

Also, from Mary tonight while writing a paper:
"What's another word for, never mind... ::to herself:: loss of sexual innocence..."

Halloween Update

2006-10-31T01:16:00.000-05:00

We had a great halloween, watched Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter for the first time over the weekend, and then went over to Francie's for chili and our yearly "the haunting".

The Potter-en-Español Analogy

2006-09-24T03:31:00.000-04:00

When I used to lay awake in my bed late at night thinking by candlelight, I always felt like "my" mind shifted a few inches forward in space, almost like it was sticking out from right behind my eyebrows, and sometimes out beyond them even. It's funny that now, years later, I words and descriptionfs for that same kind of racing, analyzing thought as "cognitive" and "prefrontal cortex." I haven't been able to think whole thoughts in a long time. I ussually get distracted before I can finish sentences. When I'm writing, I often write the clauses seperately, as if they were whole thoughts unto themselves. That's why editing is so good for my papers, because I can grasp bigger chunks, whole things at once.

This semester's classess have been very interesting [they haven't been that bad, or hard] but I still feel like I haven't had anything make concrete sense yet. It's as if I'm reading a lot of words but haven't connected them to ideas in my head. Which is strange, because in many cases I'm just expanding ideas from last semester. It's as if I'm stuck in second gear, and doing donuts: my cognitive thought is very active, but it's not getting anywhere. I don't have the powerful ideas that let me move into higher gears and go straight in one path. And reading all these words is very tiring.

Reading some of these technical papers [i.e. for molecular mechanims of memory] is a very similar experience to reading Harry Potter in spanish. This summer I got five chapters into the third book. I'm able to follow the plot, and some of the tenses, and recognize enough words to understand the dialogue. But its not a natural feeling yet; I strive to get through every page. I don't ever pause to think about how funny a joke is, I just congratulate myself if I understand it and move on.

A lot of my reading so far has felt the same way. I get through it; I understand enough words to talk about it intelligently and to summarize if need be and to extrapolate a few conclusions, but the context of each piece, what it is, where its coming from, and what you would use it for as a source, all seem beyond me. This is especially true with the universe of imaging literature that I'm reading for Sterling's class. I know that a lot of understanding and context is actually being created just by reading this, and that the next time I read even the same chapter or article I'll understand more. It's like reading HP tres: every book makes the next one easier. Hopefully by the time I reach HP seis o siete the text will flow naturally in my head. I'm doing the hard work now and setting the groundwork. But it's still hard.

The Potter Analogy can be carried over to work: learning in this type of situation is an iterative process. So much of it is just exposure. So much of it is just familiarity with the vocab. Some of it comes naturally now, some of it doesn't. The canonical HRF? Check. BOLD undershoot? Check. Affective vs self? Possibly. T2*Star weighted k-spaced fourier transformed frequency filtered image? Not really.

Well, this entry has been going pretty well. This little exercise has helped me to stretch out my working memory by a few words. And I think I'm making sense. Maybe this bodes well for class. I would like to be able to reflect a little bit more on the readings. I don't have that many, anyway. Next time I'll put the book down in between pages and make sure I understand what's actually going on. Or try to, at least. Working less, and finishing the database, will definitely help. Huzzah! I feel that my mind has pulled back from outside of my forehead, which means that it's not racing cognitively, which means I may be able to get to sleep.

I'll have a gettier example with my morning coffee, please...

2006-09-21T12:33:00.000-04:00

Whether or not this is a gettier case, it's certainly epistemologically interesting.

Standing in the bathroom after just waking up, without a fully engaged set of language corticies, I made an awesome mistake. From Socrates until about 1963, the generally accepted idea of knowledge was "Justified True Belief" (JTB) where you have knowledge about something as long as you have a reason to believe it and it is in fact the case. However, Edmund Gettier provided a set of counter exampls known as Gettier Cases, whereby one has JTB but not knowledge.

My gettier case is rather crude, but I think that adds to the humor. For some reason, my internal monologue dictated "I am peeing in the bathroom", but what my mind was thinking was actually closer to "I am peeing in the toilet". I mixed up the words of bathroom and toilet, mistakingly using the first word for the idea of the second, but even the first word had an accurate meaning. I was right! Normally, these types of mistakes which I often make just sound hilarious. But this one was correct! I had an accurate statement, without an accurrate thought. However, I was correct in saying that I was peeing in the bathroom, even though my mind was totally wrong! Normally my mispoken, halfwrangled, not awake gibberish is embarrasing, but this revealed something about knowledge!

The Reign of Pants is neigh upon us...

2006-09-18T22:13:00.000-04:00

So begins fall, or almost. Sept. 23 this year. Yesterday was a warm fall day, today was a cool fall day. It's too early for summer to end... ::sighs::

Something tells me its all happening...

2006-09-05T20:19:00.000-04:00

Mary and I took our Labor Day action seriously this year by visiting the zoo. I'm especially happy with her "I'm Short" face. How Cute!