On theoretical geology

"There is no nobler aspiration of the human intellect than the desire to compass the causes of things. The disposition to find explanations and to develop theories is laudable in itself. It is only in its ill placed use and abuse that it is reprehensible. The vitality of study quickly disappears when the object sought is a mere collocation of unmeaning facts"

- T. Chamberlain, 1897

its so beautiful

I believe yes, that is 45 and raining for the next 14 days!
WHY YES! I DO LIVE IN OREGON THANK YOU!

Ecohydrology ~ Synaptic Connections

This is an absolutely fascinating video about experimental mapping synaptic connections, using ecohydrology (trees, streams) as an analogy. It's great-- how connections are formed, how memories are created, how genes determine and don't determine a connectome. It is by  a professor of Neuroscience from Harvard.

One more reason to love Oregonians

http://www.urbanedibles.org/

Because really, where else would you find an online database of "plants in [name of city here] that you can pick for food."

It's SCIENCE really

All those years I spent teaching myself NOT to curse, and it turns out it just might help me.

Well, GOSH DARNIT.
*excerpted from the news article in which I read this*

They recruited 67 undergraduates, and asked to make two short lists of words - one containing five words they might use after hitting themselves on the thumb with a hammer, the other containing five words they might use to describe a table. The participants submerged one of their hands into room temperature water for three minutes, to provide a standardized starting point, then transferred it to a container of cold water and instructed to keep it submerged for as long as they could. In one condition, they were told to repeat the first swear word they had included in their list; in another, they repeated one of the words describing a table.

The researchers measured how long the participants kept their hands submerged in cold water, and asked them to rate the amount of pain they felt. Their heart rates were also recorded after they had submerged their hands in room temperature water as well as after the submersion in cold water. Contrary to their hypothesis, they found that swearing actually reduced the amount of pain felt. The participants kept their hands submerged in the cold water longer for longer, and also reported experiencing less pain, when they repeated a swear word than when they repeated a word describing a table. Swearing was also associated with increased heart rate. 

Swearing therefore enabled the participants to tolerate to the cold temperature for longer, and also caused a reduction in their perception of the pain felt. A difference between males and females was observed. Swearing led to a greater reduction in pain perception and a bigger increase in heart rate in females. Most interestingly though, the effect of swearing in females occurred regardless of their tendency to catastrophise their pain. On the other hand, in the males, catastrophising was found to diminish the effects of swearing on the felt pain. This is interesting in light of other findings which show that men generally catastrophise less, but swear more often, than women.

This study shows that swearing appears to have an analgesic effect under certain conditions. Exactly how is unclear, but the authors suggest that it is because swearing induces negative emotions. It is well known that pain has a strong emotional aspect to it. Fear of pain, for example, is known to enhance pain perception, possibily by activating pathways which descend from the brain and modulate noxious stimuli entering the spinal cord. Swearing, too, is known to induce negative emotions (according to Steven Pinker, it taps into the "deep and ancient parts of the emotional brain"). It may therefore trigger a physiological alarm reaction known as the fight or flight response, which accelerates the heart rate and reduces sensitivity to pain. 

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/07/swearing_increases_pain_tolerance.php

my secret dream finally coming true

I don't know if this worked. If not, try here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_intelligence.html

Also! he mentions networks!

I lol at this

Weather At-a-Glance:

On Average:

Marietta, GA is warmer than Corvallis, OR by 6°F.   Marietta, GA is wetter than Corvallis, OR by 8.2 in.

Records:

Corvallis, OR recorded the highest temperature of 108°F in 1981.   Marietta, GA recorded the lowest temperature of -10°F in 1985.

"Marietta, GA is wetter than Corvallis...."

Weather At-a-Glance:

On Average:

The average temperatures are the same for San Francisco, CA and Marietta, GA.   Marietta, GA is wetter than San Francisco, CA by 29.5 in.

Records:

San Francisco, CA recorded the highest temperature of 103°F in 2000.   Marietta, GA recorded the lowest temperature of -10°F in 1985.

"Marietta, GA is wetter than San Francisco..."

Strange, I think. I would not have expected this. I suppose its looking at total precip, not precip frequency??

Weather At-a-Glance:

On Average:

San Francisco, CA is warmer than Corvallis, OR by 6°F.   Corvallis, OR is wetter than San Francisco, CA by 21.4 in.

Again, how interesting when you think of these charts. Corvallis is sort of a skewed bell curve with a really hot july and august and the rest about the same. San Francisco is a flat line above all the rest of the months. But that skew pulls our entire mean above the SFO mean. 

I have  learned today that statistics and real life don't really seem to agree. 

On a side note, regarding a particular issue with multivariate weighting statistics. I was thinking of this the other day, how to weight the clustering coefficient, boundary parameter and the other stuff. It occurred to me this: PCA is really a weighting based idea, right? The eigenvectors are the weights, and the eigenvalues are the associated variances. So the weight that should be assigned to each one should be the proportion of the variation that it explains.

I think the original PCA was called "multivariate scaling" actually and.... looks it up... some guy named W.S. Torgerson came up with it. I have also read here that there is a special set of algorithms for "multiscale multivariate analysis for given measurements of dissimilarity measures and variables in mulitvariate data" and that this is found in Meuman J and Verboon P, 1989. 

Articles and I have a little misunderstanding

The following fun comes from Steven M. Chambers' Spatial Structure, Genetic Variation, and the Neighborhood Adjustment to Population Size. Conservation Biology 9(5): 1312-1315. No harm is meant to Mr. Chambers' original article, he just used lots of lines to play with--->

While flipping through 110 years of journal articles about "spatial structure" of "forest populations" I have inevitably found many articles that use the term "subdivision." Of course, this isn't referring to West Hills or something, it's an ecological term.  but now just imagine, what if you were reading an article about something like this, and you interpreted the words "subdivision" "neighborhood" and "neighbor" to mean exactly what they mean in the non-science world, people living in a community. Behold! Humor!

example: making fun of people living in a red-neck place "Fragmentation can reduce local population size to an extent that demographic instability and dangerous levels of inbreeding may occur."

example:why there's always very interesting people in your neighborhood, even if your township seems mostly the same: "Effective subdivisions may retard the rate of loss of overall variation, but there are limits and exceptional conditions determined by among population migration and extinction rates." 

example: why you should marry your neighbor: "The size of a neighborhood... was intended to approximate the effective size of the local random-mating unit within a continously distributed population." 

:) WIN.

mmmmm

Today I received a beautiful thing in the mail, which came in a brown box... FILLED WITH CHILI BAMBOO SHOOTS!!

Oh HOORAY! I AM VERY HAPPY! THE BEST MAIL EVER.

My stir-frys will be EPIC from now on... Chili Bamboo Shoots + Broccoli + Soy Sauce + Brussels Sprouts + Bean Sprouts + Pumpkin + Zucchini

I think I get about every major vegetable with that!

On a side note I also have mostly finished my carbon paper for my geophysics class. It was pretty hard working in a group with that many people. The discipline barrier can be quite large; for example, at one point we are looking at a south facing slope. A forester, hearing south facing slope, would think "this aspect means more radiation, leading to dry climate, low vegetation." A geophysicist thinks, "perpendicular intersection of cap rock with the underlying bedrock, slippage of soil, low vegetation"---- we get the same end, but have two different means. So then you go along wondering, why are they talking about this perpendicular rock, and they're thinking, why are you talking about radiation and in the end everyone's kind of confused about everything. I ended up just doing a model for decompostion of stream wood, standing dead wood, and (with a lot of help) wood lying on the ground. The distributions turned out to match the ideal distributions for the stand types and I think that my carbon balance is within the acceptable range for our (bad) sample size, so I'm going to go with that for now.

To those who are studying for Oral Exams...

those of us who are still trying to figure out what "nearest neighbor interactions" means...
those of us who think, "eigenvalue" means "that thing you calculate with PCA"
those of us who find matlab most useful as a quick way to organize massive amounts of data
        and yet can't program even a "hello world!" into matlab
those of us whose job involves running through the woods looking for where the red cable intertwines with the green cable because that means we're within 1/2 mile of where we need to be
those of us who still google "inches to centimeters!" or worse, "meters to kilometers"
those of us who think we are researching hard but really have "xkcd" "dinosaur comics" and "wow armory" on their top 8 pages (also the internet company and gas company and wachovia and email... where is web of science? nowhere to be found)

those of us who really aren't working hard yet but just can't seem to think efficiently

salute you. because you are really smart.