| Summer of numbers |
[Jun. 20th, 2008|02:55 pm] |
A winner is me! I'm about to have an awesome summer: doing research, working on my dissertation, tending the garden, and enjoying the weather. I'm still working on two research projects, doing programming and analysis for both. One is my advisor's data mining app, the other is a glacier simulation model for a geology prof. (The latter is fun to work on, but sooo slow, ba-dum-ching.)
My dissertation work has languished the last couple terms, so I really need to put my nose to the grindstone. (Clearly the problem has been a dull nose.) I'm at the stage of writing my proposal, and all I've done is lots of reading and thinking. I need to narrow to a short list of topics, and figure out which I can actually complete. And then, get on with the even longer business of completing it. (As a reminder: I'm looking at a number of topics within the intersection of artificial life, theoretical biology, and evolution, leaning toward the abstract.)
I have found that I really like working in our yard and garden. We moved in last Fall, and the yard had been mostly untended for quite a while. We put in a couple flower beds in front, with a bunch of beautiful perennials from M's mom's nursery. We cleaned and enlarged the beds in back, and planted a bunch of veggies and herbs. The lawn was mostly moss and weeds, which I've put a good dent into. I'm not a fan of big grassy lawns (which is to say I hate them), but it's nice to have a small patch that you can sit in, and the cats adore it. Also, the crappy grass-less lawn turns out to be a haven for slugs. I've been baiting them with PBR, which is amazingly successful, and disgusting. I feel a bit bad slaughtering them, and doing so by taking advantage of their apparent species-wide alcoholism, but they were devouring the crops, and I'm not going to use poison. (Slug poison is people poison?!?)
The best part of the yardwork is this: I have discovered that weeding is a video game! For real. And it ranks among the best games I've ever played. The proof is in the after-images. You know when you play Tetris for hours, and then you can see it everywhere? There are zigs and zags behind your eyelids, and you're always scanning your environment for the perfect place to drop a long one. (Sorta like being a homeless person, but different.) Well, I see clover vines and dandelion leaves everywhere. It's so amazing how good the mind is at tuning to different kinds of pattern matching. There are at least four distinct phenotypes of clover in the yard, and the more I look for one, the less I see the others. (Amusingly, I was listening to a Stephen Jay Gould essay while weeding the other day, and he talked about this very phenomena. He was out on an dig with one of the Leakeys, and couldn't see the bones that they were finding. However, he did see snail shells--his expertise--all over the place, which the others had never noticed.)
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Plugs!
Firefox 3 is pretty awesome. I've been using it for a few weeks, and it's much improved over v2. A few of the add-ons I liked haven't been updated yet, or won't be, and the "add bookmark" GUI is apropos of nothing in the universe, and windows occasionally lose keyboard focus... BUT! It's way faster than before, and doesn't leak memory like an upside-down colander, and has much improved interfaces for bookmarks and history and passwords. Plus many other benefits. I recommend it.
My friend James has a book coming out this summer, in the young-adult/fantasy genre, that I recommend very highly. It is The Order of Odd-Fish, and it's great. I've not read the final version, but I'm very excited to do so. He is an amazingly talented dude, and you should buy this if you like the genre at all.
My friend Marie has an album out, of her lovely jazz singing. You can listen to it and buy it for cheap on her site or her myspace, and I suggest you do. It's fun stuff, especially if you are a fan of good voices or jazz standards or the concept of fun. |
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