Slate has a great and somewhat snarky review of east-coast Chinatown busses and their competitors, with and eye to towards the predilections of hipsters, or maybe just the young and not-yet-wealthy. Money quote: “If you can still appreciate the charm of cracking open a $2 beer, you will find much to appreciate about budget bus lines.”
Okay okay, I know it’s been a while, but first I was writing my thesis, and then being plied with alcohol and mixed emotions as a future alumnus of a wealthy institution of higher education, and finally reverting to my natural, hermit-y state, as per the instructions of not one but two trashy magazines’ horoscopes. Phew.
Anyway, yesterday I went for a truly lovely walk at the Bangor City Forest, which included the absolutely, can’t-believe-I-never-realized-how-fucking-awesome-it-is bog boardwalk. There I met many old plant-y friends, free from the fear of being sucked into the peat and preserved for curious scientists multiple millennia down the road. There was sheep laurel (Kalmia angustifolia), there was labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), and of course, there was Sphagnum moss in abundance. Pitcher plants in full flower (Serracenia purpurea) were a special treat. I even made some new friends: the cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea), bunchberry (Cornus canadensis), and who can forget cotton-grass (Eriophorum sp, actually a sedge).
You can find some photos here, and the full list of the plants that can be found in the bog here.
- Freelance science and health journalist and mental_flosser Maggie Koerth-Baker is guest-blogging at boing boing. So far she’s got posts on how to colonize a nation, a proposed expedition to the center of the earth, and Scutigera coleoptrata, the house centipede (including such fun facts as
2) Scutigera Coleoptrata are Efficient: They’re actually capable of eating several other bugs at once, noshing on one meal while holding onto another with one of their 30 legs. They usually hunt at night, waiting for prey to get close enough that they can jump onto it, lasso it in, or whip it into submission.
- The March issue of The Atlantic has a neat article on class in America that looks at changes over the last 25 years. Most notable is the rise of the bohemian “creative type” X-ers as a social class all their own, and how this is related to and affected by the economic boom and impending doom.
- Today on my bike ride I had to ford the Green River. There’s a small bridge that’s out on Water Street, and the presence of actual construction workers prevented me from using their little foot bridge like I did last time. This brings the number of things I’ve survived in real life that you can die from in Oregon Trail to two.
- My wheels are trued and tensioned and beautiful. Assuming they pass muster with Paul at the Spoke, all I need to do now is…everything else.
New photos up on flickr as promised, including my wheels and a couple shots of the GQ bowlstravaganza.
(Link: On the truing stand on flickr)
As the title of this post says, I am starting The Big Push, the Last Hurrah of my undergraduate career. Right now it is April 10th. On May 19th, I defend my thesis, and on June 7th I graduate from Williams. Hopefully. That leaves just a little more than a month for dicking around and actively avoiding my work (presuming, likely fallaciously, that this will not figure prominently in my later life), and lord knows I have a lot of that left to do.
I think, at this point, my friends can’t figure out why I can’t just get my act together and finish things a little early like normal people do. Sure, there are perfectly good reasons that make for tempting rationalizations—I conduct an a cappella group! I write a blog! I have a hobby—but the truth is, I get some kind of sick thrill out of pounding papers out at absolutely the last minute. As miserable as it is from a material/physiological point of view, there is something undeniably awesome about getting jazzed enough to pull off really good procrastination. Sure, I felt accomplished when I finished my last tutorial paper almost a day early, but I was also disappointed about how it came out and in that situation my usual excuse—that I did the best job I could given the time I had to write it in—didn’t apply.
Don’t get me wrong: I am under no illusion that my procrastination is rational or calculated. At the root of it is the disappointment I alluded to. At some deep, reptilian level, I hate the idea that my work will never be perfect or even as good as I think it could or should be, and a lot of my resistance to doing work comes from a desire to avoid that disappointment. Once I get over the initial hurdle of “oh my god this sucks,” actually doing the work is pretty fun, even though the active search for distractions persists in many cases.
That’s the point where I am now with my thesis: getting over that first hump. And I think I’m just about at the top of it. It’s strange to think that, at least in my case, the biggest challenge of writing a thesis isn’t intellectual or academic (although those certainly aren’t trivial) but rather psychological, but there you have it. I suspect that everyone wrestles with these sorts of issues as part of any really big project, and that may be the real value of these things: they force us to confront our inadequacies and personal demons.
Two notable things happened today. The first is that I finally ordered an electric kettle on Amazon, so that very soon I will be able to make truly ridiculous quantities of coffee with my lovely 8-cup french press and burr grinder combo. Since my current water heating solution is a tiny, ancient microwave that boils a cup of water in a blazing six minutes, the gigantic french press has been sadly underutilized.
The second is that I stole the Ark’s truing stand and am now in the process of truing my wheels, which I laced last weekend. They are the most beautiful things I have ever seen (except you, Ruth). This is very, very exciting, and hopefully the big fixie project will get wrapped up soon. Hopefully. I’ve got a nice series of photos of the whole process that I’ll put up sometime soon when I can justify procrastinating some more.
He lost his leg because he sacrificed it to save a kid from getting run down by a truck on the cruel, cruel streets of New York City. Was homeless for a while, and then someone gave him a bike. Now he is gainfully employed, and probably the chillest person I have ever seen.
And he rides a fixie.
Link: YouTube (via The Sometimes Angry…)
Looks like we are baby-stepping towards the singularity:
An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain’s ability to learn more closely than any other machine.
Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.
I think this is very cool, for a couple of reasons…
This video was made using nearly 300 hand-cut 10×10 cm linolium block prints for The Art of Lost Words project, inspired by the word dehisce, which we coincidentally learned in Botany a couple of weeks ago. It’s what the anthers of a flower do when they split open and release their pollen. Back when English was still young and hip, it referred more generally to “release of material by splitting open of an organ or tissue; the natural bursting open at maturity of a fruit or other reproductive body to release seeds or spores or the bursting open of a surgically closed wound.”
(Link: Dehisce linomation print, via boing boing)
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