mens et manus creant lux

White House "open for questions"

2009-03-25T04:28:23Z

President Obama has decided to hold a "town hall" meeting on Thursday and is asking for the public to submit questions (using Google's relatively new "Moderator" product to decide which ones make it into the town hall).

I ask: "Mr. President, would you consider starting an "Apollo Program" for clean energy with the goal of having every sector powered by 75% renewable resources within 20 years, launching a new manufacturing industry around solar airships, electric cars, etc?"

You can ask questions of your own or agree with my question by going to:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/

To find my question, try searching for "apollo program clean energy"

Uh-oh!

2008-10-10T02:32:51Z

A couple months ago I was getting $2 for a pound -- today it is down to $1.68!

40 Weeks

2008-04-18T19:22:53Z

According to LiveJournal, I haven't posted to this journal in 40 weeks. Wow. Life goes by fast, especially when one is once again studying. In any case, it must be time for an update. As LiveJournal also managed to get me to pay another year of subscription, I really ought to post more often and will attempt to do so in the future.

My last post was a video of Midsummer Night's Dream. It seems like yesterday that I was doing that, but I noticed the other week that HRST was soliciting directors for this years shows already, so in reality it has been about a year since I started that process. I was happy enough with how the show turned out, though certainly the project also had a number of disappointments (and as director I shouldn't really bother differentiating between those that are more internal or external to my influence--they are all my responsibility). Anyway, THANKS so much to my wonderful cast and crew for making everything possible with their tireless effort and contributions above and beyond what should normally need to be asked. We put up a very impressive show when you consider the (low) amount of time and resources we were given. I hope the HRST season made money and that this year people will have to worry a little less about money and a little more about being organized. Best of luck to everyone who is proposing a show for this summer!

This reminds me, I still have the two-camera video of Midsummer in raw format somewhere... not sure what I've done with it after the move, but I'll look for it and see if I can get that posted soon.

Speaking of the move, I live in another country now, and have for... counting them... about 34 weeks now! I am a D.Phil student in Statistical Genetics at the University of Oxford in England. I've already learned a great deal more about both Statistics and Genetics and feel like I've contributed a lot to the group here at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics where I have my studentship. I've been involved in analyzing data for many projects based in Oxford as well as for several international collaborations, and already have a half dozen papers on my CV. Not bad for 6 months! I have a few first-author papers in the works as well, but I probably won't be ready to publish anything until summer.

I spend most of my time working on the computer, manipulating large data sets, using existing analysis tools, and fairly frequently writing small scripts or programs to do something special. I have also setup a couple of pipelines for automating data analysis for quantitative traits, one of which is now being used by others at the Centre for their analyses. Yay.

My mom, brother, and sister came to visit me in Oxford for Christmas and I made a Christmas goose, and it actually came out pretty well (I did make a practice one with friends first, but actually that one came out very well also).

I have also been doing some theatre over here. I co-designed the lighting for "Alice: Through the Looking Glass" in the Oxford playhouse, which was both successful and fun to work on, though the incredibly short amount of time they give designers to work in this country is rather appalling. I also designed lights for a couple of shows over in Ireland (both in Limerick and Galway), and am now working on both the set and lighting design for another Oxford playhouse show--Agamemnon, the Oxford Greek Play. Plans are also in the works to do some Edinburgh fringe festival shows. Oh, and I am now the President of the Oxford Technical Theatre Society, which is called TAFF.

A few weeks ago my youngest sister Erin had her new baby girl, Leila. So now I am an Uncle! While I was in Sweden at a Symposium on disease genetics (I work primarily on the Genetics & Genomics of Complex Diseases & Traits), I videoconferenced with her and she was so cute! I want to go see her in person as soon as I can! As of a few days ago she joined facebook--one week old for her first video call and two weeks for her first social networking site. Hrmmm. What a life you'll have, Lily.

This week has been a bit unusual as I've been spending my time at the lab in the actual lab, wearing a lab coat and gloves and everything (usually I sit in the front rooms where I have a desk and a computer, working on the computer all day). I am helping out on an RT-PCR experiment and it seems to be going pretty well so far. I really wanted to learn how to work in the lab, mostly so that I can understand where the data I am always working with is coming from, but also so that I'll have the ability to do some real experiments if I need to. Exciting!

Anyway, I'm still alive and I've been working hard on my studies and research work. Hopefully I'll get a chance to come visit people soon--planning on being in the states for a course towards the end of June and will hopefully stay over there for a bit longer before or after.

HRST presents William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

2007-07-09T20:41:10Z



"HRST presents William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream" on Google Video
Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theatre presents William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Summer 2007 stage production featuring the music of Felix Mendelssohn. This is a single-camera video recording of the performance on June 27th, 2007.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2007-06-07T20:49:12Z

I am directing A Midsummer Night's Dream for Harvard Radcliffe Summer Theatre. http://hcs.harvard.edu/~hrst/

The show opens on June 22nd and plays until July 7th, so if you will be in the Boston area during that time, plan on coming to see the show!

pancake tuesday

2007-02-27T04:49:57Z

I was in Ireland for a few weeks there, mostly to design a show (Glengarry Glen Ross), but also to just hang out. It was nice having a house to stay in (Aoife had an extra room), rather than staying at hotels and hostels as in my last trip. It was also great to get to know the cast, which included genuine Irish people as well as some Australians and some Americans. The whole experience was just a lot better when I was with people who I knew, or at least, was getting to know. Though, Galway is so awesome I very well could have had nearly as good a time there just hanging out with strangers, because they are all so nice!

Anyway, Ireland was great. But the best part was possibly the day before I left. The Tuesday before lent, known in some parts of the world as "Mardi Gras" and in others as "Fat Tuesday," it is known in Ireland as "Fat Tuesday." And, it is possibly the best idea ever. I went to a Pancake Tuesday party held by Eoghan(pronounced owen) and Brid(pronounced breedj), both members of the Glengarry cast. The main idea of Pancake Tuesday is basically that they just start making pancakes -- delicious pancakes -- and don't stop until everyone present is totally stuffed. They mostly made full-pan pancakes that were more like crepes and were wonderful. I filled some with Nutella, others with sugar, and still others with maple syrup. They also made "small pancakes" which are what we Americans would normally think of as pancakes. They were delicious as well.

Eoghan also made some kind of punch-bowl drink called "woo-woo" or "wa-hoo" or something along those lines. It was good... kind of syrupy, but still fairly light, and definitely alcholic... in any case, it went well with the pancakes.

Mmmmmmm, Pancake Tuesday.

Hooray for awesome Ireland.

The Non-Suspicious Devices

2007-02-01T17:59:28Z

I'm going to skip ahead to the part where we now have possession of two of the "suspicious" devices formerly on Boston/Cambridge buildings. It really doesn't look suspicious at all.

The artists who put these up and who were arraigned this morning in Charlestown district court could _maybe_ be responsible for _littering_, but I can't imagine finding them guilty of anything beyond that. The devices have magnets on the back so they can easily be stuck to a steel surface, and the magnets even have little cloth protective covers over them so they won't scratch the surface they are stuck to. This is modern high-tech graffiti that doesn't do any permanent damage, so it really can't even be called vandalism.

Take a look (Ignignokt from Central Square):

If it isn't clear in the photo, it has:

LM2585S-12 3A, 5V flyback regulator

12F629 PIC Microcontroller

IRF530 Power MOSFET

105 Blue LEDs

80 Green LEDs

What appears to be a photoresistor

A few electrolytic caps

A bunch of resistors

A 4-D cell battery holder

Boston's "Suspicious" Objects

2007-01-31T20:55:45Z

There were 5 news helicopters hovering over the Charles River Basin for much of the day today. The police have apparently detonated several "suspicious objects" under bridges, under the highway, and at various other places.

Observe the "news":
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/suspicious.packages.ap/index.html
http://cbs4boston.com/topstories/local_story_031135507.html

Now check this out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanderlin/tags/aquateenhungerforce/

It seems to me that some kind of guerilla/viral marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I guess, count this one as a success... 5 helicopters and national news coverage is a lot of free advertisement. But I expect there may be some kind of bill coming from the Boston police department for having to send the bomb squad all over the city...

Not to mention the traffic being stopped/slow on I-93, two MBTA lines being shut down for a while, all kinds of people being late to work, etc...

SPAM!

2007-01-24T07:04:11Z

My old MIT email address is now getting an average of 800 messages per day, approximately 0 of which are real messages. I can no longer withstand not using automated spam filtering. Sadness.

I hope everyone in the world understands that email was never a guaranteed means of communication, and that it is becoming less and less reliable as the noise level rises. Also, no one should ever be upset if someone sends multiple messages because previous ones didn't get a response. Getting no response is meaningless, as no communication can be certain to have occurred unless both parties have taken part in it.

If you write me an email and I don't respond, don't assume I hate you. The most likely thing is that I didn't see your message, since if it even got through it is surely surrounded by 20+ spam messages, and it is possible now that I have to resort to filtering that it didn't even get through at all.

No accent!?

2006-12-11T03:38:10Z

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
Boston
North Central
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Bobcat

2006-11-06T21:49:59Z

I was disturbed to find that the internet (Read: "google") didn't know very much at all about the HP Bobcat computer. It seems that once you filtered out all the talk about the Bobcat skid-steer loaders, you were left with a few mentions in old host tables, an entry in a list of old machines at U.Wisc, and a note in the man page for the Utah raster toolkit.

I felt this had to be rectified, so I started an article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobcat_%28computer%29

Feel free to improve it, or add some little anecdotes about how great it is to play "bog" on a nice Bobcat screen.

iChat Weirdness

2006-09-30T01:43:30Z

Ok iChat, I do like that you offer me the option to have both "away" messages and "here" messages, but don't you think I might like to use the same away message for both? It seems that if I set my "here" message to something which has already been set up as one of my "away" messages, you mistakenly just set me to "away" instead of here. ARGH! Pay attention to what I am telling you to do!

Get Excited!

2006-09-18T14:30:15Z

Are you ready for Aaron Sorkin's new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? You better be. Tonight at 10PM. Non-native english speakers beware, as the fast-paced banter is back in full force!

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20060918-9999-1c18studio.html

Look out eahearn!

2006-09-13T21:45:26Z

The slimasseur is back, and is as frightening as ever!

The "iGallop" seems to be more-or-less an updated slimasseur. It is currently on display in the front of the Brookstone in the Cambridgeside Galleria.

The product page at Brookstone: http://www.brookstone.com/store/product.asp?pid=531707&wid=1&cid=18&sid=113&prodtemp=t2&cm_re=A_BKST*MN*531707

A very scary TV ad from when the product was unveiled in Asia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDZnvkqClmA

After I saw the iGallup, I was looking for an photo of the ol' slimasseur (is that even spelled correctly?), but couldn't find anything on the old Putz web pages. Damn you, summer of 1999 East Campus fire renovations! Surely someone, somewhere has a photo of eahearn sitting on it while doing her 8.02X or 3.091 homework, circa 1997-1998... no?

Civilization

2006-09-12T20:46:35Z

Anybody else think that if you were playing the US in Civ IV it would be about time to start saving frequently and hoping to find some lucky way out of all your many missteps?

The National Debt: $8,531,165,428,704.39 ($8.5T) and increasing at $70,686,845,226.54 ($70B) per month. Increase in the last 5 years: $2,707,570,239,879.56 ($2.7T). (graphs at http://www.marktaw.com/culture_and_media/TheNationalDebt.html, data at http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpdodt.htm)

Purging My Belongings

2006-09-06T19:00:43Z

I'm in week 2 of the great purge of much of the belongings that have been cluttering up my living area and effectively making it unusable.

There are some things which I have successfully been able to part with, and I'll probably be posting to reuse at some point. Most of this is in the crufty electronics and old computer parts category.

However, some other categories of items have been causing me some difficulty. There are a great many boxes of textbooks and such, which I must have imagined I would have some use for in the future, as it seems I have never sold back or otherwise gotten rid of any of them. I'm still a bit torn on whether it is useful to keep (some?) of them, because I have gone back and referred to some of them on (rare) occasion. However, they do take up quite a bit of space. Should I want to get rid of them, what do people recommmend as the best way to sell them? I feel like I can't give them away since I barely touched some of them and all in all they probably cost a few thousand dollars. I wouldn't expect to get all that back, but it seems like they should be worth something to someone, assuming the editions are still in use somewhere. Also, now seems like a good time of year to be doing this (or perhaps already actaully a little bit late for this semester).

Also, larger and functional electronics cause a problem. I've got my Leafscan 35, which is a vintage-yet-high-quality slide/film scanner that used to be used by the AP photo desk. I suppose I could sell that too... eBay, I suppose? It is rather large to be shipped, though.

That's just barely scratching the surface of the room, really. And I'm also working on getting rid of boats and cars.

Meh. So much stuff.

europe

2006-09-05T15:29:12Z

The worst thing about Europe is that you can't go out in the middle of the night and get a Slurpee.: Tellis Frank

Hmmmm. I hadn't thought of that. I'm quite sure this Tellis Frank fellow must've meant Slush Puppy rather than Slurpee, since the S. Popy is clearly the superior midnight frozen beverage. I wonder if I lived in Europe whether I would forget all about the possibility of an occasional midnight Slush Puppy or whether I would have an unfulfilled craving that would wind up driving me insane.

my first spam comment

2006-08-30T04:51:03Z

I received the following comment (screened and deleted) to my post of the view of Sydney at night and the Koala at Lone Pine. At least it is entirely topical. It seems to me that this guy (whose IP indicates he is in Russia) just did a search for "sydney hotel" and limited it to blogs and such so that he can post a link to his Russian hotel booking site cheap[dash]sydney[dash]hotels[dot]com (DNS and ISP are both Russian as well). I suppose this probably works pretty well to get their rank up and get noticed better.

This kind of pseudo-spammy comment is really tricky. I'm almost impressed by the effort, but still, I shall provide no link to his site here, just wanted to point it out. If it weren't for the dead givaway in the last sentence ("oh, it was really nice...first-class food and service..."), I might not have noticed that it was actually spam and let it through.

Had he bothered to notice that the hotel that we stayed in was actually the superior Shangri-La, he might've linked that one to his site instead. I think I might have been able to let that go, since even the hotel part would have been on-topic (and the Shangri-La is awesome enough to warrant links to booking sites).

|
| From: [info]kenny_lue
| 2006-08-30 04:29 am (UTC)
| IP: [195.46.106.158]
|
| I’ve been in Australia last year and I liked it! By the way I love your photo of koalaJ in Sydney I
| visited the zoo and was charmed by all those animals…I lived in a wonderful hotel named Sheraton
| hotel …oh, it was really nice…first-class food and service…
|

Northern Territory

2006-08-25T21:09:18Z

See the road in this picture?

Whitsunday Islands

2006-08-16T07:54:54Z

Heehhnnhh

Australia So Far

2006-08-09T00:39:37Z

I'm about to go out of contact for about 10 days (going into the sailing and outback portions of the trip). So far, we've spent one day in Sydney and two days in Brisbane. From here, we're driving (~6 hours) up the coast and will be staying at a Farm Stay tonight. Then after another ~6 hour drive, we'll be in Airlie beach and will spend the night on the yacht which we will be hiring for the week before setting sail the following morning. Following that, we drive ~12 hours north to Cairns and fly to Darwin for some adventures in Kakadu National Park and the Arnhem land.

The trip so far...

Sydney:

(view from our hotel room at the Shangri-La)

Brisbane:

(Koala at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary just outside Brisbane)

daily show on iTunes Music Store

2006-08-01T23:17:25Z

Ok, so today someone mentioned an older episode of the daily show that I wanted to check out. I figured, "hey, why not just buy it from iTMS?" I'll tell you why not. Because, for some reason, Apple only keeps the last 8 or so episodes for purchase on the music store. What?

Why???

There are three reasons I can think of why people would want to buy episodes from iTMS.

1. They do not get comedy central, and this is the only way they can watch episodes.
2. They want to watch episodes on their computer or iPod, and this is the most convenient way to do so.
3. They want to see an older episode that they don't have a recording of.

I do get comedy central, and I can watch episodes that I record myself on my computer fairly easily, so the only reason I would want to use the music store seems to be the only reason they have prevented by not selling older episodes.

Clearly, they have the older episodes. Surely they don't get rid of them because they take up too much space... so, why not sell them? Are they trying to avoid conflict with DVD sales? Are they going to sell daily show DVDs? That seems like an odd thing to do, and it's not like the episodes on iTMS are cheap compared to DVDs anyway.

This just seems like a bad idea on their part. They had me; I knew from their advertisements that they have the daily show for sale, and I was there ready to buy it. Instead of selling it to me, they've chased me away from the first TV show purchase I wanted to make.

This reminds me of a good idea for all the extra bandwidth we have on cable. Why not make a channel for every channel called the "last year" channel and the "two years ago" channel and so on?

That way, we would have Comedy Central, Comedy Central: Last Year, Comedy Central: Two Years Ago, ... Comedy Central: The First Year. It's like a macroscopic time-shifter, and it's something not easily done on the consumer side (unless you have a DVR that can hold a whole year's worth of broadcasts... what is that, about 10 terabytes? maybe in the near future...)

Dred Fog

2006-07-27T20:11:37Z

Dred Fog is now located at Captain's Cove Marina in Bridgeport, CT. Slip I-55 (Island Dock).

Cedar marina charged me another $200 today. I am so glad to be done with them.

night operations complete

2006-07-27T10:22:35Z

'Twas the night of the carboat, with lots of ins and outs
not a motor was whirring, except for the scout's
the grey tarp by magnets was secured with care
in the hopes that no rain soon would get in there
and the carboat was nestled, held fast with wheel chocks
with mem'ries of paddlewheels, destroying its blocks
...

The Carboat is safely back in New Hampshire...

Hooray Carboat!

die

2006-07-26T06:54:58Z

Speaking of dice, I always thought that "the die is cast" was referring to a die (metal mold used to make metal parts) being made, such that it was predetermined how the parts would come out.

Browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary (the only true dictionary of the English language) today, I found that it seems to think that it is instead referring to a die (singular of dice) being thrown (cast) already and it likewise being too late to go back and do it again.

I don't want to start an argument over which of the two meanting is the correct one, or in fact whether even one of them could be correct. Instead, I choose to take this as yet another example of how these kind of things only become lasting if they work in more than one way. I wonder if the saying "the die is cast" would have stuck for so long if it could only be applied to one or the other of the meanings, or if it is precicely because there is some ambiguity, without destruction of meaning, that it has stuck around.

These are the kinds of thing that can never be proven, and are rarely found in the dictionary (even the OED). Are there people who study this kind of thing and try (with futility?) to make some sense of it all? It seems to me that this kind of reinforcement only ever really exists in the minds of individuals and rarely escapes into written form except perhaps in meta-conversation (such as this).