- 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)
The first stop on my grand-ish spring break adventure was Atlanta, GA, to visit some (most) of my study abroad program-mates. We ate, we drank, we lived like kings and queens. Notable highlights were a really sweet potluck dinner in honor of Passang-la, our incredible program coordinator of sorts who is in the states for a year on a Fulbright. Said potluck was hosted at the artist commune where one of the older program alumns lives, which was quirky and charming and well-decorated. There is also a recording studio in the basement, and a backyard with a sizable bonfire pit (where the picture above was taken).
A few of us hit up Little Five, a cute little rasta/hipster/scenester/touristy neighborhood, where we perused the offerings of the local independent book seller. We also sat outside and enjoyed the great truly phenomenal people watching at The Porter, where we were waited on by Sebastian’s South African rugby coach who by turns indulged and belittled our various tastes in beer.
We also had our obligatory night on the town, which is remarkable mostly for where it ended. I think the name itself is enough: Gladys Knight and Ron Winan’s Chicken and Waffles. Just take a moment and let the settle in. Even though we got there around 3 am, we still had to wait an hour to get our chicken and waffles, by which time I was nearly comatose with exhaustion and would have fallen asleep on the spot if it were not for the thought of the Midnight Train (four friend chicken wings and a waffle) that would soon be mine.
The best part, was, undoubtedly, getting to see everyone from India, and being able to just pick right up where we left off, as if the year since we’ve last seen each other hadn’t happened at all. As I get ready to graduate from Williams and head out into the big wide world, I worry more and more about being able to form meaningful relationships with people outside the Williams community, and it was really nice to have a reminder that I can still relate to non-Williams folks. Granted, Emory isn’t exactly culturally that far from Williams in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a start.
Coming soon: Boston, Bangor, my bike, and general musings about life and graduating.
(link: photo)
I have become suddenly and completely smitten with the idea of cloud computing, which as far as I can tell is just a fancy way of saying “just trust Google with all of your data.” Highlights include:
- Having email and AIM/gchat all in a single, shiny web interface that will likely run at the speed of light when Chrome is released for Mac.
- Keeping our lab’s subject lists in a Google docs spreadsheet and not having to worry about Excel doing something ridiculous like deleting our records for half our subjects
- Using Subversion to automatically synchronize experiment code and data files across all the computers in the lab
- And therefore being able to download the data for analysis on any computer on-campus (and probably off- as well)
Yeah, I know the last two probably don’t count as cloud computing, but they make life in the lab about seven times less tedious. We used to have to go around to each terminal computer and manually copy every single data file to a server in order to analyze it. Now all the data is backed up over the whole lab and getting the data for analysis is as simple as a single command. All of this is made substantially easier—especially for non-command line junkies—by TortoiseSVN, a truly excellent Windows shell extension that puts the whole SVN interface into a contextual menu in the Finder (or whatever you Windows people call it…) and provides a nice graphical interface for each of the commands.
Now all we need to figure out is how to start the experiment programs over the network. Then life will truly be good.
In other breaking news, I just finished a draft of my tutorial paper more than 16 hours before it is due. This is truly revolutionary. On friday, I am flying to Atlanta for a couple of days of romping with the Emory folk, including a special appearance by our most wonderful program director, Passang-la, who is studying at Laramie U. for the year. After that it’s to Boston for a couple of days with Jue et al., and then home to rest up/work my ass of on my thesis (EEK).
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