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.

Not to judge a book by its first chapter but...

It's pretty rare that I come across a piece of academic literature that I find interesting yet understandable. I mean, so rare that it almost never happens. It's either, well, that abstract looks cool, but what is going on in that paper? Or, well, I can understand this, but it's actually written for middle school science education (I kid you not, that's how I learned about declination, watching flash files that were intended for middle school kids created by NOAA). 

But this spatial-temporal stats class I am in so far has a really cool book. I don't want to judge a book by its first chapter, but it's pretty cool. There's a few formulas, but a lot of it is "well, if you see these key words in a study, you know that they are probably using this kind of technique, and this is how it applies to this one really accessible example." I'll be eager to see how chapter 6, fourier transforms, is made easy. The class seems pretty alright: essentially it's how to model spatial temporal patterns without relying on regression or ordination. Some of the stuff I heard said today was fourier transforms, alternate steady states, and modulated response. I have no idea what those are. But it will be a new look for me. 

How to convince southerners to protect the environment

Promote eradication of wetland pests as food!

http://www.nutria.com/site14.php

Fueling my mulitasking need one online video at a time

After my introduction to "six ways that fungi can save the world" I discovered the enjoyment of TED videos. I guess I would call this "random professors giving progressive slide shows on natural resource management"

I think this one is pretty cool.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_margonelli_the_political_chemistry_of_oil.html

And hey, there's 700 of them. That will distract me for days. The image of the "green gas station" is pretty strange.

Also I recommend the seed bank one. It's cool actually. Makes me want to visit SVALBARD even more!

Fine-Scale Gravity

http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/gravity/index_e.php

Clearly, I are NOT physicist, and I never even thought of this before. How cool! I had no idea that this even existed! I'm reading a study now where they are using paleogravity to discuss the formation of the cascade boundaries. WHOA. DEEP.

Can't sleep

Darn it, I can't sleep, so I watched "Avatar" again. :D

Made me think of something-- I remember when I first saw that film I said to my family, oh, it's awesome, you've got to see it. They responded, oh, but we don't like that fantasy kind of stuff.  Started to think as I watched it today-- doesn't everyone like, in one way or another, watching a fantasy of epic proportions-- whether that be a space fantasy, a heroic fantasy, or a romantic fantasy? I mean, so much literature that people have been into over time, like Beowulf, Tristan and Isolde, Knights Tales, Pride and Prejudice... all distort reality in a beautiful way.. and people like it, some like one story more than others, but everyone likes to forget the limits from time to time. As far as entertainment goes, I say that it is good to spend a few hours being immersed in a world where good things happen to people who act well to others. Is reality like that? No. But sometimes letting ourselves dream outside of the bounds of our physical and moral capacities is okay, too.

It's not that far away

Recently, I noticed something very great!

Oregon is kind of near Alaska!

I really thought it was far away, but as it turns out, the "Panhandle" of Alaska is very close...Okay, so you have to take a ferry to get there, which adds on about 18 hours drive time (I don't know about fly time)... but still...

Fresh figs

There is really nothing quite so tasty as fresh figs. I suggest you eat some when you return to California. I bet if Washington figs are good (even though kind of temperate in much of WA so a lot of wet soils), California figs are even better.

Did you know that the Ficus genus has the fastest growing trees in the world? (Ficus = figs).  I believe it is Ficus lutea that is the fastest, although I could be wrong.

Add figs to "plants I will cultivate some day when I have a garden"

As a side note, my "compost experiment" on the limited space on my patio is failing miserably.  I discovered there is concrete beneath the few inches of soil I have, so I have no primary consumers like worms to eat up the nitrogenous scraps I have been putting on it. I am hoping to increase bacterial decomposition by tarping the area and raising the heat level.  I originally thought I could do minor planting in the site, but it looks like I'm stuck with flowers and herbs, possibly I could put up vines, I guess.

I was thinking today of my idea "vegetable patch" were I to make one. I have learned that it is good to stick to only a few crops at first and add more as your original ones get established.  I will assume that I will get a Pacific climate, which means that I would start with blueberries and summer squash for summer crop and wintersquash. and pumpkin for winter crop.  Later additions of tomatoes, peppers, califlower, small and large brocolli, strawberries, and grapes would be added. Figs and citrus can be grown inside.

Also some kind of indoor sprouting would be cool. I have tried a few seeds here with varying success but I think my lighting is not correct for the little leaflets. Aerogardens = party time.

Well, that was a worthless post. But I do love some plants.

The end!

I got 2/10 suckers

The sad thing is that, well, it's true. I have worked at both a museum and in an entry level retail job where I was assaulted by superiors. 

http://www.holytaco.com/2008/06/03/the-10-most-worthless-college-majors

And since  the website is named holy taco you know it must be teh science.

A lesson for the living

I read the post below, and I think about it. It seems remarkable to me that many folks don't realize the limitations on their actions when their health is gone. I've always felt more limited by my health than anything-- it's almost an OCD thing for me, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me and why I can't have that same freedom as everyone else. Here's what I reflect:

The drive from Athens to Atlanta seemed long at the time, and longer when I considered that I was completely immobile once I got out of the car. It was stupid, really. One day I'm running along, shivering in the February morning, and the next I've got searing pain in my ass anytime I try to move. I'd tried everything-- hot baths, massage, e-stim, no exercises, running through the pain, swimming, everything.  On the road, a billboard, and on it, a picture of an old man in a wheelchair with a grandson tenderly poking him in the face. Big white letters proclaimed "You don't have to live in pain."

You don't HAVE to live in pain. But what about when life and pain go hand in hand? I was a runner then, fit and active, which is completely different than being happy and healthy. I could run for two hours per day on one meal in the evenings.  The world was regimented. When my body ached, I pressed through it, until I was too sick to run, then I took to bed hard until I got better. There was no middle ground, and so it was always a flux of sickness and activity, one or the other. It was 100% on or 100% off, and at no time did I ever feel like I was in good health as I was in high school, when I could wake up every day and blaze through the streets, and fight men 2 or 3 times my size. Quite often I would think walking through the downtown of Athens, if a car was coming at me right now, I couldn't possibly run away from it. But put a timer in a coaches hand and my scholarship papers in the other and I was on fire.

When I dislocated my SI joint I was lost. I literally could not run. My ass would burn from my shoulders to my feet. It had crushed my sciatic nerve and any motion hurt. They shot me in the ass with corticoids, powerful steroids to make me numb. When I was numb, I could run. They wore off at about seven PM and I was immobile until the next morning at 5 when we practiced first. We were greyhounds, expendable dogs. What mattered was "could I run a 17:00 5k?" not that getting into the car caused me to scream with pain. I bit my lips not to wake up my neighbors. I drove 200 feet so that I wouldn't have to walk, because I couldn't make it.  I laid down in elevators. They shot me every day, a direct needle between the joints of my back and butt. It hurt like hell. It was a like a spinal tap every morning and afternoon. It didn't get better. I saw that old man sign, and I was mad, who was that man to say I didn't have to live in pain. I was doing everything right, and the pain got worse and worse.


With time, and lack of patience, the pain subsided, only to be replaced by some other pain. If it wasn't my ass, it was my knees, and if not knees, feet, or shins. As I got older, and sicker, and out of school, it became more serious. My intestines didn't work. My pancreas doesn't work. My kidneys don't work. Everything I chose to do lead me to pain, and was it all my fault? Yes.

It isn't cool, or fair, to be 25 years old and sometimes your eyelids are so swollen you can't open them in the morning. Some days you feel fine and the next days your legs are filled with so much water that when you press them it makes dents. You think to yourself, I'm supposed to be young and healthy, but I've abused my body so much, now I've got chronic pain. It just plain sucks. Your mind burns with questions at simple choices-- every decision is an ultimatum. Wouldn't it be great to be able to make normal choices without painful consequences? Let me exemplify:  for me, the decision of "should I eat this bit of blackberries?" is not "do I want blackberries?" but "am I willing to sacrifice feeling stable for having a huge blood sugar rush, a stomachache, and swelling in my hands so much that my rings cut into my fingers for blackberries?" I mean, for god's sake, it's just a piece of fruit. Or to exercise, the question "do I want to go for a run, get in a bit of better shape and tone myself, and enjoy the dark morning" becomes "am I willing to trudge along, dragging my legs that always feel like anvils across creaking joints all over my body, just for the sake of trying to have 1/5 of what a normal person's metabolism might be like?" And then the worst part, you realize that 4 years of stubborness and a free ride to college with a few thousand dollars to spare that you chose is the reason for all this pain. I would ask, was it worth it, but it wasn't. It was a complete waste of time, for the sake of fitting into what others wanted me to be, and what I could afford.

I think that the caged bird is more cognizant of the vast openness of the sky than the free falcon. You dream, everyday, that you can fly. You seek out cures, remedies, anything, a new way of life, studies showing that it works, something to get to that blueness. Sometimes you take a risk, and always it fails. Time brings relief, but anxiety that something more will happen.

I read that people don't realize the limitations on their health until it's gone, and I think, hell, I learned that lesson when I was eighteen years old, when mine left. There's a giant life ahead of me yet. I am your subject, old wise ones. Imagine that you have that knowledge young, what do you do? Where do you go when  you view realizing and honoring your dreams in light of the fact that you have lost a powerful tool for that end?

You reflect, conditionally. What if I hadn't listened? I was told to wear certain clothes and feel happy in certain situations; my brain literally cannot do this. It doesn't behave correctly to do this-- when I see my skin exposed it agonizes me. I look in the mirror, and it agonizes me. People tell me to just make the choices anyway. I struggle against myself and I do it, just like I ran through pain to chase a scholarship, and I find it only makes the situation worse. The mind is ill and not tending to the illness makes it sicker. I am not everyone else. People say, become a great athlete, and the training I was given caused me to not only fail at that dream, but to become significantly less atheltic than I was before. Again, some people may train themselves fit, but I am not everyone else. All it should have taken from me is a "no! that's not for me, it doesn't work like that for me, this makes me ill"-- but for some reason getting turned around and following what most think is true is easier than forging a path.

You speak from experience. I think it's true that we all have our own dreams and methods of achieving them. To young people everywhere I encourage that you explore the world and yourself without fear of social conviction. Become comfortable with yourself and with being with yourself. Learn to say "no" and realize that people who love you won't hate you for doing it. Don't accept a lot of responsibility. Spend your afternoon outside and sometimes, eat ice cream for dinner. Don't go to a church that makes you dress up. Or dress up, if you like doing so, for a soccer game. Most importantly, do things that make you feel good. When you have to make a hard choice and money is a driving factor, remember that money isn't happiness.It certainly can buy nice toys, but in the end it's better to feel good and take out a loan so that you can live in the mountains and buy your food at WINCO than to be completely sick and miserable, but be able to afford premium cable and sushi dinner.

Here it is. To the living, I say, learn to be brave, and be yourself. Learn to be brave about being yourself. Remember that people are each different, and that everyone is struggling with something. Everyone around you is hurting in some way, and it's not the same way that you hurt. Be compassionate. Don't argue or blame people for wanting attention-- of course they want attention-- so give it to them in the form of love and sympathy. To the dying, you are right.  Reflect and know you are special and significant not for what you think now, but how you lived and loved, and mostly, how you took care of yourself during your life. May all have the grace (rather than the misfortune) to realize and embrace their own frailty.

Regrets of the dying

From Inspiration and Chai:

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

Powerful stuff. Read the whole thing. On a (somewhat?) related note, I stumbled across a peculiar finding with regards to solar flares. Sure is an interesting topic, and I have always loved space... Oh, if only there were some way to connect what I'm doing to this fascinating topic!

Heh.