Mabel Says

Mabel has left the blogosphere

2009-11-18T20:36:00.004-04:00

It was never my intention, but after over 13 months of absenteeism, I guess I should accept that I've officially left the blogosphere.

Why?

Well, to put it bluntly, I'm no longer a grad student... no longer a post doc... I have a job-type-job where blogging during the day just ain't an option no more.

So.

To the only person who might ever still check to see if I'm coming back, I'm sorry to say that it is time for me to bow out.

Maybe I'll come back with a new persona one day soon.

Mental Note

2008-10-06T12:06:00.002-04:00

Pasta that's been in the fridge for ten days may no longer be good lunch fare.

Elvis has left the country

2008-10-02T09:48:00.004-04:00

Here's a rather interesting/worrisome piece of hacking. Apparently, some folks went along and created a forged passport of the King, complete with RFID technology, that was accepted in a Dutch airport.

Wasn't the Canada-US border supposed to move towards RFID technology?

I am a Gentle Pig

2008-09-26T07:34:00.005-04:00

Dessert? Oh no, I couldn't possibly.

Well...

Maybe... just a small piece, though.

No, not that small. A little more and ....... there! Yes, perfect.

I have a friend who describes someone exuding this kind of behaviour as being a gentle pig. You can be a gentle pig by resisting then accepting dessert, a second helping, more wine, or really any sort of gastronomic indulgence.

But there's more to being a gentle pig than simply accepting more when you really wouldn't/couldn't/shouldn't. Whatever it is that you put on your plate/in your glass, you have to finish it easily (and ideally with rigour) as if no effort were involved in completely consuming whatever was put in front of you in a timely manner.

For most people, their inner gentle pig is released when someone offers something like ice cream or cake after a big meal. Me? My gentle pig seems to be attracted to weirdo things like salad, or one particular dish that, when put in front of me, causes me to lose any semblance of self-control. I can be reclined on the couch, not moving because of the agony of a full belly, but if I know there's more to be had then I will find the inner strength to sit upright, walk over to the dinner table, and have another full serving.

And another.

And another.

Until there is none left.

In fact, my version of hell would probably include a bottomless source of this dish, and I'd never be able to stop eating it. (Or would that be heaven?)

Now this dish, Molokhia, is a little bit of an acquired taste. It's kind of slimy in texture and to be blunt, it's not exactly my wife's favourite. But from time-to-time we'll make it and when we do it's a big treat for me.

After several years of observation, my wife has become well-tuned to my weakness towards this dish. When we make it for dinner she plans accordingly. For example, we had molokhia for dinner last night, and she made over twice as much rice as what we would normally make for any other rice-based dish. She only had one small plate, I had four large ones.

At one point in my marathon-of-dinner, I tried to stop eating. I could feel the rice expanding in my belly and thought I'd do the adult thing and stop eating. But my wife, I think, gets a bit of a kick out of watching me eat so much food... When I announced to her that I wasn't going to eat anymore, she appealed to that teenager appetite that was hiding in there, she appealed to my gentle pig. I can only imagine the pleasure she got out of saying to me, "But there's really almost none left. Are you sure you don't want it? Should I just throw it out?"

And with that, like a good gentle pig, I went and had another plate. And then another. Until finally there was none left.

After dinner, having accomplished my mission, I was on the couch trying not to move. At the peak of my agony, my wife leaned over and said "Honey, could you please get me a glass of water?" When I began to show the slightest bit of discomfort at the idea of moving, she followed it up with, "It will be good for your digestion."

But really, how could I say no? She had indulged me in agreeing to have her less-than-favourite dish for dinner.

I was a happy gentle pig.

Reminds me of that time I played bass guitar for Jimi

2008-08-26T16:56:00.003-04:00

Okay, I never really dreamed of playing in the NHL. In fact, I didn't play ice hockey until I was about 20. But this made me giggle while I read it...

As my old roommate, the goalie, would say: "He shoots, save no rebound!"

Even though I'm loyal to Second Cup

2008-08-25T09:36:00.003-04:00

I'm a sucker for scones. In fact, I will at times walk past the local cafeteria where I work, past the Tim Horton's, through rain, and around construction sites, to get a good scone to go with my coffee. The problem with scones is that, like any pastry in a coffee shop, they are just too pricey to justify buying. Oh, and they're usually chalked full of sugar, but I digress.

A few years ago when my sister was visiting out east, she made these fantabulous scones for breakfast one morning. They were such a hit that, at her wedding last fall, somebody wrote "Make More Scones!" and submitted it as her advice to the newlyweds on how to nurture a long and happy marriage. I made the recipe once. They were delicious. But the ordeal broke the student-quality food processor I had at the time. I haven't ventured to make them since. But I will.

Anyway, I'm getting distracted from the whole point of this post. (No, it's not about scones. Or at least it wasn't when I first thought of writing it.) This morning, Lifehacker pointed me towards a cool little recipe book.
I thought that it might interest a few out people out there, even if the recipes aren't from Second Cup.

peanut butter running time

2008-08-04T15:24:00.003-04:00

I like running. I like going for long runs. A lot of people go on runs to think. I go to clear my head.

My meditative method for clearing my head dates back to when I started running as a teenager. I pull some rhythmic section out of a song -- usually a couple of bars -- loop it over and over in my head while running. This repetition creates a trance-like state where I zone in only on running: my breathing, where my feet hit the ground, when my feet hit the ground. It also stops other thoughts from entering my head, because those would mess up my cadence and probably cause me to get a stitch or something.

Often I seem to get "Big Calm" by Morcheeba stuck in there, but other tunes will kick in from time to time. One of my least favorites is Hammer Time, which dates back to my high school days when an aerobics class in the centre of the track would blast MC Hammer while I did my track workouts.

On occasion, this "rhythmic meditation" can backfire because I don't have the best ability to control what the tune will be and once I get this song in my head, it doesn't leave until I'm done. This weekend, I ran to what was probably the worst song (if you can call it that) I've ever had stuck in my head. It was in there for every step of my hour-long run. And I hope it never finds its way back in there.

... so ...

2008-07-29T10:05:00.006-04:00

Hi.

I've been kind of busy.

And, well, I sort of forgot about this blog. And for that I apologize.

In all likelihood, this blog would have remained forgotten and fallen into the abyss of unused and unmaintained websites. But then, in the week that I declared myself to be less busy than I'd been in over a year, I got three separate hints that I should start blogging. (And I didn't even know that three people read this site.) So before the guilt from those hints wears off, I thought I should at least post something to get the ball rolling again.

So, to begin, what have I been doing? Well I'll give the mega-short version. There are three major things that I would have been reporting if I'd remained an active blogger (which, based on my archives, halted some time in May 2007):

1) I got married.
2) My wife and I bought a house.
3) I wrote and defended my thesis.

It's kind of funny to think that of those three, the largest time investment (so far) has been number 3, my thesis. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also feels the most anti-climactic now that it's been achieved.

So anyway, I'm going to try to make another run at this whole blogging thing. Hopefully I'll have time to post more often about more interesting things. If only I'd kept a that-would-make-a-good-blog-post notebook in my pocket during the last year, then I'd be off to the races.

2008-02-05T10:35:00.000-04:00

Had to share this, although admittedly it will appeal to a very small audience.

in case you were wondering

2008-02-05T10:29:00.000-04:00

In case you're wondering why things have been so quiet on this site in the last few months, this figure shows the mood of your average PhD student as a function of time. It was generated by a friend of mine who just completed his degree in December after a long and courageous battle. The gray dot indicates my present location -- at least on the time axis.

But dammit it will all be over soon. And I hope that it will end on the "Woo!" side...

10 bucks is 10 bucks

2008-01-31T18:38:00.000-04:00

This is a real ad:

SURVIVAL SYSTEMS LTD.
Research Subjects Wanted!!! EC

Dartmouth, NS, CA

1/19/2008 12:00:00 AM

Research Subjects Wanted!!! "ECG responses to Helicopter Underwater Escape Training"

We are looking for 30 healthy men to participate in an experiment in our helicopter underwater escape trainer at Survival Systems Ltd in Dartmouth to be arranged between March 25th and April 6th, 2008.

If you are in a helicopter accident over water you will be flipped upside down and submerged. Therefore, we want to see what your heart rate and response is when you are inverted in our helicopter underwater escape trainer. You will be compensated for your time with $100 cash! For more details about the study please e-mail us at some@email.address

Originally published in The Daily News, Halifax, Nova Scotia

I can't help but think that there are very few people who would do this for $100 but wouldn't do it for free. For some reason, I immediately thought of this.

moving now safer than knitting

2008-01-17T10:39:00.000-04:00

Depending on how you interpret this, one might suggest that gardening is only 10 times safer than sky diving... interesting.

Luckily, when I tried "died in a moving accident", there were only 4 hits, and they pertained to turtles, fish, and computers. So the coast is clear for this weekend...

too much stuff

2007-12-18T09:13:00.000-04:00

What can I say -- things are so busy these days I was even considering not visiting family this Christmas...

So, in the mean time, here's some interesting reading on the search for Steve Fossett, and here's a bit of a scary video on why maybe you don't want more stuff this Christmas.

2007-12-06T10:54:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know -- it's been a while.
I've wanted to post a little more than I've been able.
No promises on posting numbers, but I'll try to visit on occasion, if only for my own sanity.

why the upcoming cold winter doesn't refute a warming planet

2007-12-06T09:57:00.000-04:00

Recently, I've read several claims that we don't need to believe the planet is warming because this winter is going to be one of the coldest winters that Canada has seen in some time. While this logic is intuitive at first, I find myself using the same piece of information to support the opposite hypothesis, namely that climate change is upon us. Why? Simply put, my expectation of climate change is that in addition to warmer weather, we will also see more cold winters.

As anyone's life experience tells them, weather is variable. It changes from hour to hour, from day to day, from season to season, and so on. If somebody records the temperature every day for years and years and years, and looks at the temperature on (for example) September 22nd every year for century, then they will find that on average the temperature was 17 degrees, but that sometimes it was warmer -- as much as 25 -- and sometimes it was colder -- as cold as 5. (I've pulled these numbers out of a hat for demonstration purposes.) If that same person made a table of all the recorded temperatures, looked at how often a given temperature showed up, and graphed the result, then it might look like this:

If you gave this information to a statistician, they would try to fit what's called a distribution model to those temperature data, giving something like this:

The model here is a normal distribution, which is like the "Bell curve" teachers might use to adjust grades in a class. In reality, the temperature distributions would not be normal like this; they would have a more complicated statistical distrution. For now, let's just assume that this distribution is good enough, so that I can demonstrate my point.

Now, suppose the climate at our weather station changes. Things get warmer, and more "energy" is put into the weather system. If we do the same study, our new graph might look like this:

It looks pretty similar, but if you look carefully, we can compare the modeled distributions for the two sets of data:

Now we can start to see the effects of the changed climate. The average temperature is higher, there are a lot more really hot days, and also a few more really cold days. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a situation with a lot more hot days and a lot more cold days.

So how do we know that the climate is changing? Statisticians have this trick in their toolbox called extremal analysis. Basically, they use fancy mathematics to determine how often we're going to get those low-frequency events, or extreme events, when we don't have time to wait for them to happen. In addition to a warming "average planet", researchers are seeing more extreme events. There are more hot days, more cold days, more hurricanes, more droughts, more floods, more ice storms, etc., etc. Their findings suggest that the weather systems are experiencing a shift like the one we have just described in the example above. Hence, just because this winter is going to be a cold one, it is not a reason to denounce climate change.

trying to not rock the, um, apartment

2007-07-30T13:19:00.000-04:00

Back on land.
Back on sturdy land.
Back on sturdy land that doesn't rock.

Well, sort of. It took a bit of time for my brain to catch on to the fact that things weren't rocking anymore. When I awoke after my first night back on terra firma, I could feel the rising and falling of the room. In the shower that morning I turned sideways to brace myself, the shower was rocking back and forth. It was my first ever case of the "dock rocks", a term I've heard many times but could not find on in my 45 second search of the internet. Basically, it's the sensation that things are still rocking even though you're back on land.

The trip itself was a good one. The first few days were tough, but on the morning that I had to start working, the seas got a little bit calmer and my queasiness subsided. That meant I could enjoy a glass of water, or a coffee, or some juice, and that I could focus on my work. For the first time ever, I got over sea sickness before getting off a ship. Woo.

ahoy!

2007-07-17T07:40:00.000-04:00

Off for an adventure chasing eddies. Back in two weeks. You can follow the action live at this site.

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. At least you'll know where I am, though. Which is probably more than I'll be able to say as the sea reminds me why I shouldn't be a field oceanographer.

2007-07-10T23:47:00.000-04:00

Things have been slow around here. Well, by here, I mean this little blog. Things have been rather haphazard in the real world. Between school and SAR and wedding planning and post-school planning, there hasn't been much time to write anything. Well, really, there just hasn't been much inspiration to write anything worth reading. I've been thinking about this waves, and rings, and eddies, and a few other things which, in a twisted context, include this guy (or gal):

last week -- a more grounded review

2007-06-25T08:28:00.000-04:00

A quick note to fill in a few blanks from last week's post. First, I am getting back to my normal self as the emotional strain from last week is releasing itself.

The search was one of the roughest I've experienced. Looking for two teenagers, suspecting the worst while hoping it is only a prank, has its toll. In addition, it was a high-profile search: our staging area was swarming with media, family, friends, and curious onlookers. It was also my first time being involved in the management side of a real search. On Wednesday, I was on site from 4:30 am until 10:45 pm, dealing with search management issues.

Throughout my years working on the search team, I have learnt that I am often proficient at blocking out emotions during these events. This allows me to think and act calmly. Essentially, I hide in an objective "shell" and guard myself from emotions during the event. Though I hate to say it in such cold language, it can almost feel like I am playing a game at times. In many ways, this is an advantage for the lost person. While it does not remove the sense of urgency from the event, it allows for clear thinking and (hopefully) sound judgement. A sense of responsibility, rather than one of frantic compassion, ensures thoroughness and efficiency of one's actions. I believe that this response is enhanced by the training. Having practised what to do, over and over, one's mind is able to focus on the actual doing.

When the search is over, however, the reality of the outcome -- especially if it is a negative one -- begins to percolate into my thinking. Last week, instead of slowly removing my protective shell, it was smashed violently by the reality around me. Suddenly it was over. Family and friends, dozens of them, were consoling each other in front of the media and other onlookers. The fire department had counsellors helping them handle their grief. Paramedics were present, monitoring those who were responding to the news more traumatically. Onlookers gathered to watch the body bags be transferred from the boats to the trucks. The medical examiner was milling around in search of the that site, since it was at a different location than the staging area of the search. I found myself watching all this, walking around, wanting to help, but knowing that there were trained and qualified people already doing that, and realizing that I would be in the way. I did not want to stare, but I did not want to do nothing either. There was still plenty to do on site, however, and it did not take long for a fury activity to return to the site. As it turned out, it was not until about 3 hours after the conclusion that I got home, was able to stop, and shed my first tear.

That brief pause that I took to look around me, however, the snap-shot of hysteria and realization, still engulfs for brief moments. In the last few days, it has been the processing of those images that has occupied my thoughts. The hard part is knowing not to ignore these impulses of emotion, and to deal with them and talk about them. For this, I am express immeasureable gratitude to Allie, without whom such traumatic events would be too much to handle.

...

Today, after having had a few days to consider what happened, I am starting to feel better. The search community, which included the fire department, the police department (both municipal and federal), the Department of Natural Resources, and volunteer search teams from across the province, performed exceptionally well together. Everybody was concerned and wanted to find the missing teenagers, nobody was doing anything for their ego. We did the best we could and gave all we could, which made the initial internal response harsh. Everyone is aware, however, that there is nothing we could have done to change the outcome. This was a traumatic event for two families, a community of young individuals, and local society, and we did what we could to alleviate that trauma.

The funerals for the two boys will be held today. While I cannot attend, I will be thinking of them, their family, and their peers.

a very long week

2007-06-22T09:22:00.000-04:00

On Tueday afternoon, I got a call from SAR. For about 38 of the following 54 hours, I was responding to that call. Without getting into details now, the result was a tragic one. It has been a taxing few days for all involved in the search effort, but the thoughts and prayers go the families and friends of the two teenagers. No child deserves their fate.

one tough cookie

2007-06-18T07:28:00.000-04:00

This is an amazing story which, as the internal training officer on our SAR team pointed out, demonstrates why we always do shoreline searches after a water-related mishap.

On a related note, here's a photo of me igniting a hand-held flare in a recent training exercise:What? You can't tell that's me? Well, here's one where my colleagues are having too much fun bandaging me up:

taking things too far

2007-06-13T11:20:00.000-04:00

This is oddly funny. Or funnily odd. Or something.

By the way, sorry for not writing anything for quite a while. What can I say? The weather started getting good here, and there have been lots of other things keeping me busy too. Anyway, I will try not to post some good stuff soon...

it's a small, small world

2007-05-28T08:37:00.001-04:00

From the pages of The Economist:

A British climber made the first mobile-phone call from the summit of Mount Everest. He took advantage of a Chinese mobile-phone base to ring his family, presumably to ask if he should pick up anything on the way home.

I think I'd have asked him to bring me a snowball. Or a really big rock. Or maybe both.

Amazing that there is cell phone coverage up there but not in some remote parts of Lower Sackville (a suburb of Halifax).

the cold river

2007-05-24T08:08:00.000-04:00

One of the best summaries I've seen for the situation unfolding in Lebanon:Or, if you prefer text, here is a good start.

it's funny cuz it's true

2007-05-23T07:42:00.001-04:00

So here's the short version: there's this grad student. Who's been there for too long. Finally, he gets motivation to finish. And does. His wife tries to understand what he does. His supervisor doesn't really care. After eventually submitting his thesis, his wife decides to be the only one who ever actually reads it...

everybody's talking about it

2007-05-18T07:34:00.000-04:00

For those of you that read Canadian news online, you know the The Globe and Mail recently started allowing people to comment on their stories. At least that's most of the time. Sometimes, for certain overly heated topics where people start to get personal and racist, the Globe decides not to allow comments on a story. But most of the time, you can see what the (verbal and often uninformed) masses think about climate change, or Afghanistan, or the Queen of England, or the Ontario peach farming industry.

I often find it interesting to see what it is that people are talking about. So much so, that I actually bothered to write a script that queries the Globe website, sees what articles are being up for comments, and how many comments the stories have received. (It's also a good way to see the headlines without trying to load a page that sometimes crashes my browser.)

Anyway, here's what people are talking about this morning:

Comments as of 9:49 ADT, 18/4/2007
Article	comments/hour	# of comments
Loonie hits highest level since 1978	50.00	10
Southern Ocean drowning in carbon dioxide	12.34	232
Cost of new tanks $1.3-billion, double initial estimate	11.09	112
A House divided against itself: Can it stand?	7.88	36
Arab world debates fate of Canadian brothers	6.97	80
As gas prices soar, so does transit use	6.54	28
Israel pounds Gaza as Hamas, Fatah battle	6.20	19
Britain allows animal-human hybrid embryos	5.06	117
Arrest fails to stem tide of leaks	4.62	19
Wolfowitz to leave World Bank at end of June	4.35	60
Newfoundland held back faulty cancer data	3.55	22
Teen pregnancies drop to a new low, abortions continue decline	2.48	57
Parched Australian farms soak up best rains in a decade	1.75	4

Sometimes, I find it interesting to read the news this way first. Just see what people care about.

opposite sides of the world collide at superstore

2007-05-17T07:35:00.000-04:00

How is it that after a 12-hour day, and when I'm doing my dinner's grocery shop at 7:45 pm, I just happen to choose the line-up where the cashier doesn't know the difference between Brussels sprouts and kiwis?

After overhearing that error in identification (two people in line ahead of me), I realized that I might as well pick up that latest issue of People, and start reading. (Oh, the article about bad bridesmaid dresses.... priceless!)

those who can't teach...

2007-05-14T11:24:00.000-04:00

Here's one that the child psychologists will make a killing on (sorry, bad pun).

A group of teachers in Tennessee thought that it would be a good idea to discuss with their students what to do if a gunman attacked them. All in all, not necessarily an absolutely completely terrible idea. I mean, we've all heard about the school shootings, and having a pre-plan of how to deal with such a horrific situation is probably not the worst thing imaginable. But talking and doing are two different things, you could argue, so maybe it's not a bad idea to actually have a drill where you go through the routine of what you should do.

So following that logic, it is usually a good idea to talk about the exercise before being immersed in it, so that you can at least try to apply your knowledge. However, as you know, and as I know, and as everyone knows, it takes a lot of discipline to go through a drill with the same urgency as a real situation. And chances are if you discussed it first and then were suddenly thrust into a real situation, you would probably assume it was a drill. And let's face it... If adults would likely not treat it as seriously, neither would 12-year olds. I guess that's why we never knew exactly when the fire drills were going to happen in grade school. So perhaps, it's best not to tell the kids that it's a drill, and perhaps it's best not to talk about it before.

So far, the logic is impenetrable. But there's more. Surely if a gunman is going to shoot a bunch of school-kids, he wouldn't do it at, say, a school. Nooooooooo, he'd probably do it in a place that is unfamiliar to the kids. And it would probably be at night, too. Because that's when bad people come out from their poorly lit, dingy trailers.

So, what did the bright teachers decide to do? Stage an attack at night while on a field trip. They told the students a gunman was on the loose in the area, that it was not a drill, and that they should hide under the tables. Then a teacher, who disguised himself by wearing a hoodie (!), tried to get into the room while the kids cried and pled for their lives.

So who's idea was this brilliant plan? The assistant principal.

That kind of reminds me of a line somebody once wrote on a blackboard in high school. Those who can do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach become principals. Seriously, though, how did this guy become a principal? And how did the teachers go along with it?

worshipping Hypnos and Morpheus

2007-05-11T10:30:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow morning will be the first time since April 22 that I will not be getting up at or before 6:30. I can hardly wait. It's not even noon, and I'm thinking about sleep...

...a night in the woods ends

2007-05-11T08:53:00.000-04:00

So I recently left you with the not-so-cliffhangered to-be-continued.

But first, a brief synopsis of what I was doing last week first. Many of us remember taking a first aid course at some point. Maybe it was to get our babysitting certificate when we were 12, maybe it was to become a life guard. Me? I took my first course only 3 years ago. It was a wilderness first aid course, i.e. what do you do when the ambulance is a few hours away or more?

The course was excellent. I'd recommend it to anyone who has 3 days to kill enjoys hiking or biking or skiing or camping or canoeing or ... you get the idea.

Well, these courses expire every 3 years and I thought, while I have the time to take a week off, I may as well upgrade to the first responder course. What's the difference? Well other than taking almost 3 times as long, you get to play with toys and do more detailed patient assessments.

Okay, so because this was a wilderness course (with a lot of situational learning), we had an overnight scenario. After our warm-up, we proceeded down to a lake and "set up camp". Except we
didn't do that. We knew we wouldn't be spending any time there so we didn't really bother with trivial things like tents and fires. We had dinner, and chilled out for an hour or two. Chilling included things like a discussion of whether our instructor was a pirate and one man's randition of Acuna Matata from start to finish. Scary what a 30-year old camp director knows.

We were sitting there for quite a while wondering what was going on. Then, just as the last sun beam trickled over the horizon, we saw a flare shoot over the lake. Show time...we haphazardly get our stuff together, and started to organize. Which team is doing what? Another flare goes off. I guess our instructor thought we were taking too long and was getting impatient.

We had previously divided into 3 teams. One went straight to the north end of the lake where we thought the flares were coming from. My team did a shoreline search. I don't know what the third team did.

After about 10 minutes, my team came across somebody in the water. He was cold and shivering, and of course his clothes were soaked. We pulled him out of the water and called in the other teams for help. We removed his clothes and set up a hypothermia wrap using sleeping bags, tarps, emergency blankets, and rope. Our team started the monitoring the patient and the other two teams went off chasing other flares.

The patient was of course cold. An effect of being cold is that your blood vessels constrict a little. As a result, water is removed from your blood and directed to your bladder. (Ever wonder why you always have to pee after spending time outside in the winter?) So in addition to being cold, a hypothermic is also dehydrated. So water was one concern.

The other concern, of course, is warmth. The usual, intuitive, thought for how to warm somebody up is to put them next to a fire. If the person is actually seriously hypothermic, however, being too close to the fire can be leathal. Napoleon's doctor observed this when trying to invade Russia. The reason is because the blood in the extremeties becomes too warm, and shocks the heart when it is pumped back to the body's core. So the best way to rewarm somebody is to roll them up in blankets and let them warm themselves from the inside. Food is always good for getting your furnace going.

So what's a good backcountry solution? Hot Jell-o! (In liquid form. No need to wait for it to set.) There's a reason Jell-o's part of every hospital meal...it's easy to digest and nutritious. So we are periodically heating water with a camp stove, pouring Jell-o powder into it, and feeding it to our patient. Over time, however, it becomes clear that he is going to need oxygen, too. Our dispatch "radioed in" to 413 squadron asking for help, preferably a SAR-Tech. Of course, we couldn't get that as it would defeat training purposes, but a kit was dropped nearby and we were given its GPS location.

By now, just to give an idea of the time, it's probably about 11 pm.

I went off to find the oxygen at about 12, with a member of another team. It took a while, trying to navigate a maze of trails in the dark, but with the GPS we found it. We also brought back the stretcher and a bunch of blankets, just in case. By now it was probably 1 or 1:30.

After that a slow night of monitoring continued for us until somebody broke their femur (for the sake of the exercise). Breaking one's femur can actually be a life-threatening injury if the leg is not put into traction, so while two of us stayed with the hypothermic patient, the rest dealt with the broken leg. After probably half an hour, things were not going well for the broken leg victim, there was constant screaming and shouting from the group. I decided to go check it out.

That's when I discovered they were dealing not only with a rather big guy (probably weighing about 190 lbs), but also the whole situation was happening on a steep and rocky slope with no good footing. His leg was put into traction and the screaming subsided. The team had a
litter (stretcher) and were preparing to move him onto it so they could get him off the slope. As I approached them I leaned on a tree for support and found it was rotten and that it started to give under my weight. I looked to the bottom of the tree trunk and saw the litter
was secured to it!

I moved myself into a position where I could notify the "climber guy" in our group, who I guessed had secured the litter. Right then, I suddenly hear someone yelling "Traction! Traction!" I almost had to laugh when I saw the wood used for the traction splint was rotten and
had snapped. Three of us worked in rotation to keep his leg in manual traction while a group went and found a new, solid piece of wood. I told somebody about the situation with the rotten tree and that was also dealt with. About 20 minutes later, a new traction splint was put into place, and we started to move him. The in the litter was clearly a little concerned about where he was and that we were moving him, and so I spoke to him a little bit and calmed him
down, reassuring him we'd do it slowly and deliberately. The terrain was not good and it 8 of us about 5 minutes to move him 15 metres. At that point, he was in a stable location. The temperature was about 5 degrees so we decided to leave him there for the night but firt cover him in blankets and a tarp to keep him warm.

By now it was about 3:30. We were all very weary by this point. Our very active day had officially started 19 hours ago. It was about 4 degrees out.

We had two patients that needed monitoring. 4 of us stayed up, two with each patient, and 4 of us went to sleep. I volunteered to stay up, mostly because all my gear was in the hypothermia wrap. My hat and gloves were being used as well. Somebody lent me a tent fly and I sat there, wrapped up in that.

I feel asleep in that time, and woke up in semi-sitting position, shivering at 5:15. I realized I needed to get warm. I stumbled down to where peole were sleeping, and woke up the guy with the -20 sleeping bag. It was his shift for monitoring the patient. I took my boots off and my jacket, and crawled into his sleeping bag. I got one hour's sleep before being woken by the instructor. Time for the debrief.

So, I guess that's one way to spend a Friday night.

Encyclopedia of Life

2007-05-10T07:47:00.000-04:00

I have to admit, when I first read about this "Encyclopedia of Life" it sounded kind of kooky. But I checked out the website, and watched their little video promo. It starts with a rather elegant description of the planet's biosphere.

Constantly reconfiguring, morphing, decaying, the natural world is at once confounding, sublime, brutal, and unspeakably elegant.

That last part, about being unspeakably elegant, is what I think drives all fundamental research, and is what made me trust that the people behind this website will see it through.

As I watched the video, I thought this site will actually be really cool. This is the kind of resource that anyone with a curiosity about animals would be able to use.

That said, with the millions, of known and unknown species, it is a rather formidable project. I also wonder how it will cope with genetic realizations that, at least at the microbial level, the lines between strains and species are very smeared.

Still, I think this is a cool idea, and hope they are successful.

a night in the woods begins...

2007-05-05T16:43:00.000-04:00

As Friday was winding down for most, mine was just beginning. This week, I have been involved in a wilderness first responder course as part of may SAR training, and last night was what they called the 'overnight' component.

It started with a bit of a warm-up, a search for a couple thought to have been at a cabin in the area. We had three teams. One stayed behind with the first response gear, and the other two ventured into the woods following clues. After half an hour of slow, deliberate searching, the radio silence was broken. Crackling over the radio one of the teams called in

The cabin exploded! We need help.

And that was it. Dispatch new the location of the cabin and sent us the coordinates.

My team of three was first on the scene. There were three people hurt. One guy's finger had been blown off and his other arm was broken. Another had second degree burns to his shins and first degree burns to his hands, and was trapped by the smouldering cabin. A third fellow, had serious inhalation burns. After a quick triage, it was clear that he needed oxygen ASAP and radioed to dispatch. Evacuation was also necessary but because of our location and the weather, it wasn't happening any time soon.

As soon as we arrived on the scene, I locked onto the man with the burns on his hands and shins, pulling him from the collapsed cabin. I ran down to a nearby bog and filled zip-lock bags with mud -- cold packs for the burns. When I got back, the fire had spread from the cabin and into the forest around where we were positioned. The smoke in the air was thick, with some odd chemical smells, and it was starting to affect his breathing. If we stayed, it was a matter of time before we both had issues. Despite the pain in his legs, we had to move.

I helped him up and we hobbled away from the danger. The others were also moved. Setting him down, I got him to hold the cold packs on his shins with his hands, and ran back to get our gear, but the fire had spread and I could not recover his.

Refocusing from the lost gear back onto the patient, we started a complete survey of the situation. He was out of danger, for now, but we weren't out of the woods. The pain in his hands and legs was high. The best I could do was offer Ibuprofen. He took some pills, but I don't know what it would really be able to do.

Out of the smoke, his breathing was improving, but it was still laboured. He was feeling sick from the smoke and vomited. I collected a sample and put it in a bag to give to the paramedics upon their eventual arrival. That was when he told me he'd already thrown up before I even arrived on scene. How am I going to keep him hydrated? I thought as I tied shut the glove used to collect the sample. My thoughts started to spin. Was it only the smoke that was making him sick? Did he hit his head and not recollect? There were no obvious signs from an examination of his head and pupils, but time might make that story evolve...

His breathing was still a laboured. Did he inhale more smoke than I'm realizing? Time felt like it was racing by on me. Where was the first response team? Where was that oxygen?

Stop.

Focus.

Do what you can, and keep monitoring for developments.

Since the burns were going to take some time too cool off, I decided to take the opportunity to get buddy up off the ground. Fluid leaking from the burns was dehydrating him, and he needed to be stabilized. I pulled out my camping mattress, an emergency blanket, and a tarp, and got him into a warmer environment. But that wasn't going to stop dehydration. He needed water, as much as he could take. We found, through trial and error, that in small amounts he could keep it down. Slowly he could take more. Soon, he'd be able to eat too.

The first response team arrived, with only one oxygen kit. Clearly the guy with the inhalation burns needed it more. My patient would survive without it, so long as no complications arose. While focusing on my patient, it was clear that the he was not the one in the worst situation. I felt like I was gaining control of the situation, and that things were stabilizing.

And, as though the gods were taunting that illusion of reality, it started to rain. As I focussed on my patient, members of the first response team got busy. Tarps were going up and shelters from the rain were created. The patients were relocated to sheltered areas. Now, the long monitoring was to begin. But we were in a precarious position. We couldn't be evacuated, and the fire was getting worse. We were going to have to move again. After a good talk with my patient, it was clear he was lucid and okay with the idea of me leaving him in the care of someone else, so two of us started scouting for a better place to stay the night. The rain slowed, then stopped, and the exercise ended.

The whole affair started at about 4:30. It was over around 6. And that was the warm up for a sequence of events that lasted (for me) until 5 the following morning.

[... to be continued ...]

2007-05-02T17:27:00.000-04:00

As a quick update. I have not been blogging much because I've been

adventure racing

watching my pregnant girlfriend die in front of me while deprived of my meds

dealing with an overdosing teenager that had a stick through his arm

breaking my nose and back on while sea kayaking

handling potential spinal situations in the backcountry

hearing war stories from a retired sniper

Some of those are real. Some of those are mocked up scenarios that I've been acting out.

pre-game psyche up

2007-04-23T08:23:00.000-04:00

I have been feeling like something is missing from my pre-game routine before ultimate games. Perhaps I should take a page from Hollweg's book.

Google References

2007-04-20T12:11:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm going to say right here that this goes out to the academics in the room. The rest of you are probably wasting your time. (But then again, why else would you be here, right?)

I just discovered this cool feature in Google Scholar. It's easy to do, just follow these steps:
~~1) Cut a hole in a box.~~
1) Go to Google Scholar
2) Click on the "Scholar Preferences" link on the right:

Yeah, yeah, the arrows. I know.
3) Scroll to the bottom and click select "Show links to import citations into ..." and choose your poison. (Mine happens to be BibTeX.)

Okay, let's try this out. Let's search for something of interest.

Looks like we stumbled upon a gem here. Maybe we'll want to reference this at some point. So by clicking on "Import into BibTeX", we get the reference in BibTeX format:

@article{naveh1982kpd,
title={{Kinetics of peroxidase deactivation in blanching of corn-on-the-cob}},
author={Naveh, D. and Mizrahi, S. and Kopelman, I.J.},
journal={Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry},
volume={30},
number={5},
pages={967--970},
year={1982},
publisher={American Chemical Society}
}

Now you usually have to make small edits, but in general, the form is there! Cool, eh?

A request to the smokers of the world

2007-04-18T07:41:00.000-04:00

Dear smokers,

As somebody that shares your side-walks, bus stops, park benches, beaches, lakes, rivers, and scenic outlooks, I have a minor request. And I know this doesn't pertain to all of you, but it seems to pertain to a lot of you, possibly most of you.

You know that bit of the cigarette that you put in your mouth and don't smoke? The cigarette butt? Please don't throw it on the ground/street/gutter when you're done with it. Instead, please throw it in the trash, where it belongs.

Now that might seem like a lot of work for something so trivially small, I know. But have you ever stopped and looked at how many cigarette butts are littered near a bus stop? Or a flower bed next to a fountain in the park? Or even a garden outside a hospital? It's more than you'd care to count.

Apparently, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered each year. Here's a few ways to wrap your head around that number. If you placed those cigarette butts end-to-end at the equator, they would form a line that circled the globe three times. If you put them in a pile, the pile would take up a city block and be 8 stories high. The littering rate equals 142 per second. That's equivalent to over 2 per day per person on the planet. Or, another way to look at it: every time somebody on the planet takes a dump, somebody litters a cigarette butt. (Give or take.) That's a shit-load of litter. And the reason for it? As far as I can tell it's a combination of apathy and sheer laziness on the part of smokers. Junkies are probably more careful about disposing of their needles.

I knew a smoker that worked in remote parts of the world, where he was about a 2 hour flight from any road. He would store cigarette butts in a bag in his pocket for weeks until a plane came to deliver food and pick up garbage. So please don't tell me that carefully extinguishing the butt on the side of your shoe/a tree/the garbage can and then tossing the butt in the trash is too much work. If it were, this friend of mine would have burnt his pants off years ago.

A lot of smokers complain that their rights to smoke are being violated by a repressive anti-smoking society. That's fine and fair, and in a lot of instances it probably is going too far. But remember that it's not your bus stop/park/whatever; you're sharing it with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. My mom used to tell me that with privilege comes responsibility. If your kid ate 5 Popsicles a day and couldn't eat a Popsicle without leaving the Popsicle stick lying in the yard, how long would it be before you made an ultimatum about it?

Please lead by example.

What's black and blue and goes splat in the woods?

2007-04-16T16:57:00.000-04:00

I have to say that my feet are hurting a little more today than they do on an average Monday. But then again, yesterday I did a little more footwork than I would on an average Sunday. But, as I've mentioned once before, I'm trying to get back in shape, and I've decided to compete in the 8-hour version of the E2C adventure race. And so in preparation, my team mate and I decided to do mini-E2C this weekend. Now I spend my share of time in the woods. Well, more than average, anyway, but this weekend was especially gruelling.

I should have known it was coming. But I didn't. I was in blissfully disillusioned, thinking that we'd be prancing around forests with relative ease. That expectation was rudely shattered 15 minutes into the 5 hour race when I found myself fording a knee-deep, forty-foot wide, ice-cold, rushing stream. That's when I put the pieces together and realized the implications of having a former national orienteering champion as a team mate for the race.

At 9:15, instead of frying up eggs and sipping coffee, I was drenched from the waist down in 5-degree weather.

We crossed the stream, made our way to a the edge of a lake, and cut into the woods looking for our first checkpoint. A mere 20 minutes into the race were there. Things were looking good.

All we had to do next was bush-whack in a straight line for about one mile to intersect a road. My team-mate, who I must say has the uncanny ability to slip through the densest forest like a freaking deer on speed, was flying. I barely looked at my compass or map as I tried to keep up. When we finally emerged from the brush on a road, I had no idea where we were. That confusion was not helped by the map. The logging roads in the real world trailed away from intersections at fastly different compass bearings than the ones on the map. Some took sudden 90-degree turns that weren't on the map. All this made it very difficult to figure out where we were, and we walked aimlessly on these roads for about an hour before determining our position. By then we were about 5 km from where our planned route would have us so we made a new plan, and quickly (i.e. in the 90 minutes) found two more check-points. With two hours to go, we had found less than 1/3 of the checkpoints. We went back into the woods and started bush-whacking, but because we were looking for a trail that didn't exist, we spent the next 90 minutes covering about 4 km in the thick woods. By the time we came to a trail, we had 30 minutes to cover 5 km (on roads now) to get to the finish line before running out of time. There was one more check-point right near the end of the course, so our final score was 4/10, unlike the 7 or 8 we had hoped for.

But I learnt some lessons. (1) Even though the course was built for GPS users, we had decided not to bring any because that would be cheating. Next time, I should either take a GPS or not do a race like that. (2) Even if it's a bad map, you have to trust it. (3) If you sign up to run through the woods with a deer, you're going to get your ass kicked by the forest.

Morning conversation

2007-04-13T06:41:00.000-04:00

ME: I can't believe how much hair seems to fall out in the shower.

ALLIE: I wouldn't worry about it. Each day, 100 new hair follicles form.

ME: Yeah, I don't think that's gonna cut it.

ALLIE: Well, maybe your hair is falling out faster than it's coming back.

ME: You know, I really shouldn't worry about what happens to my hair. I mean, it is my hair that's leaving me, after all.

2007-04-12T17:05:00.000-04:00

Well, it has been kind of quiet here lately. But I think it's been a good kind of quiet. Like when you're sitting around the campfire on a beach, and all you can hear is crackling wood and and waves gently rolling onto the shore.

So here we are you and I, sitting on the beach just to the side of a palm tree whose fronds rustle as the trade winds stream past. We've been here a while, and I decide to get up and stretch my legs. The moon is bright tonight, and the clouds in the sky are sparse. Orion stands proudly in the night sky as I stroll along the black sand beach, right at the threshold of the water's edge.

A set of waves is tumbling in. The whitewash shimmers on the blackened ocean. The ocean meets my feet and rushes past -- it's slightly cooler than expected. It reaches up the beach, then recedes. For a moment, the sand gets pulled from underneath my feet as I sink an inch or two.

I've wandered far enough from the fire that I can't hear it anymore, but a quick glance over my shoulder reveals its flickering orange glow on the lone palm tree. I look up at the waves, then past them, into the restless and endless ocean.

I take a couple of steps up the beach, out of the reach of the waves, and sit down facing the ocean. There's something floating in about two feet of water. It's reflecting the moon beams. I can't make out what it is, though, maybe it's driftwood? I don't care much. Taking a deep breath, I instead enjoy the sweet smell of the nearby rain forest intermingled with the salty sea breeze.

Okay. Time to get up.

Lethargically.

Strolling back to the campfire, I stare at it's glow. Nobody breaks the silence as I sit back down. Looking at each other, we share smiles, but there's nothing to be said. A piece of firewood pops, drawing our attention back to the embers. Nothing is said and we return to watching the dance of the fire.

Yeah, it's been that kind of quiet around here.

the twisted shriek of irony

2007-04-04T13:41:00.000-04:00

So on Monday, I think the good folks over at the Globe and Mail were tweaking with their website. I was having some problems which I described to them:

I run Firefox on Linux (insert technobabble here). On your site (and only on your site) I get a segmentation fault when I try to scroll down the page: (insert more technobabble)
As such, I cannot read the content of the globe's website. Today is the first day I've encountered this problem, so it must be a relatively new change.

To be honest, I wasn't really expecting a reply, they caught me in an old-man mood and I wrote a letter to complain. But I got a reply! What did they have to say? I'm glad you asked...

We do not support Firefox on Linux, for your reference system requirements for theglobeandmail.com can be located at the following link:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/v5/content/help/technical-answers.html#general

Right...to learn more about reading the website, I am directed to the website that I cannot read. Sheer brilliance!

gzzzt - Oww. gzzzt - Oww. gzzzt - Oww.

2007-04-02T10:29:00.000-04:00

I think this may partially explain why it is that I am losing my hair.

Things I did this weekend

2007-04-01T17:21:00.000-04:00

In no particular order

Went to an alumni dinner for a university whose campus I've never seen.

Washed my memory stick (it still works).

Administered first aid (sorta) on a woman who'd been lightly bumped by a car. She'll live. Yay!

Worked on improving my SAR team's call-out service. Now with GoogleMaps!!!

Won an item in a silent auction (by outbidding Allie by $1).

Learnt how to tie a full Windsor knot from my friend, the internet. Again.

Rented a movie because of a Fifth Estate episode

Banged my head against a wall for 6 hours before learning it was the compiler, not my code, that had the problem. Only to find a different problem in the code after.

so what does this motion do?

2007-03-29T09:21:00.000-04:00

... A day in the life of Mr. Speaker ...

RESOLUTION NO. 2149 - Tuesday, March 27, 2007

HON. CAROLYN BOLIVAR-GETSON: Mr. Speaker, I hereby give notice that on a future day I shall move the adoption of the following resolution:

... Okay, so just to make sure this is clear, this isn't the actual resolution but only a motion to vote on the resolution at some time in the future ...

Whereas we were all relieved to hear that a missing boy, only two and one-half years old, had been found in the woods near Moser River just before dark last night after being lost for more than four hours; and

... sniff tearful intro, but hey, that's why we do it, right? ...

Whereas family members were quickly joined by volunteers, including the Sheet Harbour and area ground search and rescue team, with several other volunteer teams also on the way to the area; and

... yes, the volunteers did great, and deserve a nod ...

Whereas a potential tragedy was avoided due to the prompt response and coordination among ground search and rescue, the RCMP, our own Emergency Management Office, paramedics, volunteer firefighters and the Natural Resources helicopter crew;

... Oh, this is building nicely. Quite the crescendo, and now we're at the climax. Could this be for additional funds many SAR teams across the province desperately need? Finally!??? ...

Therefore be it resolved that all members of the House join the Tibert family of Moser River and acknowledge the life-saving efforts of those who helped return the boy to his family last night, cold and wet, but otherwise in good health.

Mr. Speaker, I request waiver of notice.

... oh, well acknowledgement is good too, but why include the "cold and wet, but otherwise"? Doesn't that kind of sound defeating? ...

MR. SPEAKER: There has been a request for waiver.

Is it agreed?

It is agreed.

Would all those in favour of the motion please say Aye. Contrary minded, Nay.

The motion is carried.

So what does this motion do? Anyone out there know? It's flattering and all, but not I'm sure what the point could possibly be other than PR for the MPPs who couldn't make it out to Moser River and kiss the toddler as he was being rescued. Hopefully, it's building to something. Maybe a record of such resolutions so that when it comes time to increase the funding there's something to lean on... Maybe. But I'm not holding my breath on that.

(Please excuse my cynicism. It's been a long week.)

fast molasses

2007-03-21T21:19:00.000-04:00

Okay...this is just weird.

happy eyes

2007-03-20T16:28:00.000-04:00

On the left, we have what I've had to look at for the last 2 years. On the right, we have what I get to look at now. Yay!

shaping up is hard to do

2007-03-19T12:28:00.000-04:00

So it's that time of year.

The time of year when you start to realize how little you've done since last fall. When you realize that you have become sadly out of shape, and dammit, you're ready to do something about it.

About 10 days ago, I decided I was going to reverse the getting out of shape trend that had persevered all winter. I decided I was going to try to get in shape for the Blue Nose Half Marathon. (The website for the event has the witty(?) line "the thrill of victory and the agony of the feet".) But is that enough? Nooooo. I have also decided to sign of for the E2C, and another 4-hour orienteering event shortly before it...

Okay, I say to myself, maybe I should get in shape so I can do these things.

So I wrote a note to a friend of mine (who is ridiculously in shape) to see if he would go for a couple of runs with me and basically drag me around the blog a few times. His response was something along the lines of, "I'd love to go on some runs with you, but I must warn you that I'm not really in shape right now and doubt I could run the half in under 1:30."

Well, that's a relief, since doing that last year would have put him in the top 15 finishers, and I'm not quite at that level. At least not yet... I almost hit that time once, and I still partially blame poorly marked miles for missing it, but I don't know if I'm going to go for such a laudable goal this time. I don't want to set that as a goal this year, especially since Halifax will offer a hillier course, but I kind of know myself, so who am I kidding? If I decide to do this, I'm going to want to hit that goal. He knows this.

So last week I went for my first run, since ... probably September. It was slow, with lots of stops. I probably ended up covering about 7 km. To my surprise, I was stopping due to flares up pain from an injury I incurred in 1999. But I survived, without aggrevating the old injury. (Knock on wood.)

This week was less slow, and I (barely) covered 10 km.

The first 4 km were only 3 minutes slower than the pace I'd need to maintain if I wanted to do the half in 1:30. And that's less than 20% the distance to the finish line. Then I slowed down, and probably ran the remaining 6 km in about 35 minutes. And today I can barely walk without looking funny. So I have my work cut out for me.

I think I'll just keep my goal at "don't get hurt" for a while more.

just push the freakin' button

2007-03-17T14:51:00.000-04:00

Many people I know loath the public washroom. It's an unsanitary mess of other people's business. Generally, I'd have to say my tolerance is relatively high on this front, but every now and then I come across something that makes me wonder about the general lack of cleanliness of the less fair sex.

Let me introduce you to my work environment. I work in a building of relatively well educated folks: I'd say the average person probably has more than one university degree. My building is quite secure after-hours: unless you correctly enter a 7-digit password, you're locked out. Each floor of my building has it's own pair of his and hers washrooms. By my estimate, the gent's room on my floor handles about 35 of us. Really, it's not an anonymous community; if you see a face you don't recognize you generally assume the person's lost and ask if they need help. So, you might expect, a group like this would try to take care of their environment. You know, keep it clean, be responsible enough to leave a common area more or less as you found it. That sorta thing.

So why is it that I walk into the washroom on a Saturday afternoon to find it smelling like piss?

The short answer, for those who don't have the luxury of entering the men's room on a regular basis, is because some guy was too freaking lazy to press the flush button on the urinal. He essentially peed on a wall and left his urine and all its olfactory goodness to evaporate overnight when all he had to do was press a freaking button to flush. I have never really understood why guys have such a hard time flushing after themselves. (And I hope for the ladies, that this is less of an issue for you.)

So really why is it?

Is it that some other guy was holding his ding-a-ling and then pressed the button and you're afraid that if you touch the button, your masculinity will be challenged?

Is it that you don't have time flush?

Is it because if you pressed the button, then you'd feel that you had to wash your hands and you weren't planning on doing that?

Is it because you still feel it is somebody else's job to help you go pee-pee?

Really, I'm sure you must have a good reason...something beyond my understanding. Hopefully it's something beyond laziness. Afterall, it seems that being irresponsible with your pee is not an isolated problem.

Hello World.

2007-03-16T15:18:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm still here.
No, I haven't forgotten about this site.
I'm just being pulled in too many other directions right now.

Yes, I will return soon and write something.

Hopefully, it will be something worth saying.
Hopefully, I'll have the time to say it clearly.
Hopefully, you'll think it was worth reading.

Until then, here's a fun toy to play with.

these are the waves I know

2007-03-13T07:35:00.000-04:00

In case you were curious, I study what happens to underwater versions of these waves when they hit beaches. (Link to video.)

These waves, by the way, are the surface gravity wave equivalent of a sonic boom.

when "password" just won't do

2007-03-10T15:52:00.000-04:00

You're famous, that'll be $12.50

2007-03-10T14:50:00.000-04:00

I think most of us agree that if we were famous, the lack of privacy would probably be the biggest price to pay for it. Perhaps one of the biggest symbols of that loss of privacy is the Paparazzi.

But still, isn't there a part of everyone that would like to feel famous, if only for an instant? And, perhaps, if the Paparazzi were after you, would that make you feel famous? I don't know, but that's got to be the logic behind this ad, designed for a taxi window near you.

Best Birthday Message Ever

2007-03-08T10:17:00.000-04:00

Last night, after viewing the premier of 300 with Sween, his Lovey Wife, and Allie, we got home to find a wonderful message on voicemail. It was a birthday blessing. Basically it went something like this...

Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday.

Yeah, sure it was a little late, but hey it was a Fraser girl leaving the message. (WHHATT??) And, let's be totally honest here, I'd probably be later. Besides, look at the messenger:

Anyway, I just wanted to say thank-you to GG. We miss you out here, so tell your mommy and daaddy that you have to come visit. With or without them. Only this time, you can get the banana split.

Idn't Dat Sweet

2007-03-07T07:52:00.000-04:00

Awwww.

perspective

2007-03-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

Sween gets excited about the cats...

I get excited about the Hamiltonians...

Hmmmm....

a vacation at home

2007-03-05T08:01:00.000-04:00

Things have been very busy lately. But this weekend was a break from all that.

Each year I organize a student conference, which passed on Friday. Like last year, I have vowed that this year will be my last year organizing it. Unlike last year, I think the person that stepped up to learn how to organize it will actually want to do it again next year. Instead of doing things, I tried to take more of a delegation-style of management so other people did the work, thereby learning how to do it next time (without me). Still I had to prepare a presentation. I submitted the abstract for it only four days beforehand and still didn't have results at the time. I guess that's the beauty of a local student conference: preliminary results (i.e. two data points without error bars) are okay and deemed to be interesting...

Afterward, we had a departmental party which rolled into a birthday party at my house. We had copious amounts of sangria (served in a drawer), home-made meat balls and tiramisu from PG, delicious cakes from Anna, and a wonderful collection of friends to share it all with. Those who left while the buses were still running, while leaving earlier than any wished, made smart decisions because nobody scored a taxi. We had some rather freaky weather Friday night, with snow turning to hail turning to freezing rain and everybody was looking for taxis. One person got through at 1:30 and was told the taxi company would call when they were ready to pick them up. At 2:30 she got through to another company that told her the same thing. At 3:30 the 9 people that were still at our apartment decided to walk home. I did my best to try to assure people they could stay, and when they did decide to leave, I offered them as much rain gear as I could muster to help them stay dry. No taxi company ever called back. I hope they all survived their walks home.

I am now enjoying the spoils of having gone around the sun once again. I am eagerly reading A book about Pirates! that I received from Dan and Amanda. I am not sure how they found this book since Amazon says its release date is September 2007. But if anybody needs an absolutely silly book to read, may I recommend you start at the beginning of the story, and not expect fine literature. Next on my list is the first comic book I will ever read, which was delivered to me by Sween and his lovely wife (who you must read about when you visit his site). Seriously, I have never read a comic book. Perhaps this will be the dawning of a new era in my life. From the same man that introduced me to, um, the importance of monkeys, I guess. But the chance to read a comic book that has been called literature is kind of exciting. Plus I'll be able to say "I thought the book was better". I am also excited to finally have a copy of Baraka, from Mike and his Lovely Wife. I remember seeing this movie in the theatres and being blown away. I've probably rented it 5 or 6 times in the last 10 years. The word Baraka means blessing in several languages and the film is a series of images put to music that are meant to celbrate and humanity, our planet, and the interaction between the two. Its a stunning cinematographic piece and if you haven't seen it, it's worth renting.

On Saturday, which was my actual birthday, Allie and I agreed we were going to both do absolutely nothing all day. We didn't even take a day like that over our Christmas holiday, and I can't really remember the last time we both agreed to do nothing. We eventually rolled out of bed and got out the door around the crack of noon. Despite the weather the night before, it was a beatiful day. Temperatures were around 5 degrees and the streets and sidewalks were clear. We walked downtown, and had brunch at a restaurant called Deco. Then we perused random shops, mostly window shopping. (I picked up a orange long-sleeve shirt from MEC for SAR and that's it I think.) By about 4 or 4:30, we decided to head home but thought we aught to pick up a movie first. We had chosen two films neither of us had seen: Miller's Crossing and Syriana. But then while in line at the check-out, we saw they were selling the box set for the second season of Lost. After a short discussion, we decided to go and get the first season of Lost. Neither of us had really seen any episodes but have had many people tell us that we would love it. For the rest of the weekend we lay on the couch, watched Lost, and ate leftovers from the party.

It's kind of sad when you realize that you can't remember the last time you really did nothing for a whole day, let along two. But it was a much needed mental break.

...And we now return to our regularly-scheduled, daily fugue.

The Googlespace

2007-02-28T09:38:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, while talking with my office mate, we coined a new term: Googlespace. (To be fair, we didn't invent it, but reinvented it.)

In this particular case, I was looking for the package required to run ruby from a command line, and was having a horrible time searching for it. I didn't know what it was called, and using the words "command" and "line" with any programming language will have a suite of hits that lock onto a specific target about as well as a shotgun blast. Knowing that my office mate was using this tool already, I asked him to tell me what it was called, telling him that I was lost in Googlespace. This term seemed to please him, as it did me.

Spaces have a rather rigorous mathematical definition, such as vector spaces, or returning to an old post, eigenspaces. So surely there must be some sort of encapsulating space for the seemingly infinite Googlespace.

I was a little surprised, when I Googled Googlespace to find hits that had nothing to do with my version whatsoever. As you scroll down the page, there's something about a giant earwig. Near the bottom of the first page, there were a couple of hits that were closer to our idea of Googlespace. The definition by the urban dictionary was somewhat poorly defined, as it has more do with the space you take up in Google rather than the vastness of Googlespace (i.e. it's a definition of the subset within Googlespace that describes you).

But still, I like the concept of Googlespace. Maybe one day, when I have absolutely nothing better to do I will pursue this. However, I truly hope that day never comes.

Comfort In Those Words

2007-02-23T10:24:00.000-04:00

Before getting to those comforting words, I must tell a story.

But first, I must tell you about SETI.

There's a program run out of UC Berkeley called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. Basically, the project listens to the universe, hoping to hear something from another life-form, like a radio transmission. Now, as you can imagine, the universe is kind of a big place, so it takes a lot of time, energy, and computer power to listen to it all. To help with this gargantuan project, SETI elicits help from whomever is willing to help them. They developed a program, called SETI@home, that you can download and run on your home computer.

Here's how SETI@home works. When your computer is idle it will spend its time and energy searching for new life in the universe. Every couple of days, your computer will report into SETI and let it know where it didn't find anything. The report includes an ID for the computer as well as its IP address.

Okay, now the story:

Meet James Melin, a software developer in Minnesota. He and his wife have seven home computers. Since it is hard to keep seven home computers occupied at once, James installed SETI@home on them. Sadly, a couple of months ago, his wife's laptop was stolen. The police had no leads, but Mr. Melin was determined to do what he could to get it back. Knowing the SETI ID for the computer, he went to the database where computers send their reports back to SETI. He found his computer ID, found the IP address, and gave that info to the police. The police then got a subpoena and were able to get the actual mailing address from the internet service provider. With that information, they recovered the laptop.

So, what are the comforting words?

Well when being interviewed after the whole ordeal was over, here's what his wife had to say about the love of her life:

I always knew a geek would make a great husband....He's a genius - my hero!

Best Calculator Ever

2007-02-21T17:52:00.000-04:00

This one goes out to all you Linux/UNIX/Mac users out there. (I know there's gotta be at least one of you....) Today, I found the coolest command-line calculator ever. It's a Perl script that goes and queries the Google Calculator. Here it is in action.

Fan Mail

2007-02-21T13:58:00.000-04:00

Sent to me by the U.S. Department of Commerce:

ATTENTION

Greetings billfish anglers! Please complete the attached Billfish Angler Survey for 2006 and return as soon as possible. The results will be summarized for the next issue of the Billfish Newsletter which is currently being compiled.

[yada yada yada this is how you fill out a form butthead yada yada yada]

Thank you for your support.

Smooth seas and good fishing,

Jane Doe, Fisheries Biologist
John Doe, Computer Specialist

The most curious thing about this document? I've never gone billfishing.

The next-most curious thing? I got the Pacific-Indian Ocean Survey, and I live on the Atlantic.

Meme

2007-02-20T10:09:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm going to be honest, here. I don't really understand these Meme things. But Sween seems to like them and had the grace of "tagging" me with this one. I don't really know what these things are...as best I can tell it's an excuse to write stuff. Which I guess kind of fits into the whole blog thing. But still, I've been dreading the day when I'd be asked to do one of these things. I will, however, at least honour the request of whomever sent it my way by doing my best to respond.

I guess if I'm to do this right, I better do some research. It turns out that the term Meme (pronounced "meem") is "a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another". The term was invented by the acclaimed science writer Richard Dawkins who has written books including The Selfish Gene and Unweaving the Rainbow. It's an interesting idea, and I think I've heard it talked about in seminars about different pods of whales exhibiting different cultural behaviour.

The general idea is that memes are things like paintbrushes or catchy jingles or new ways of making tires...basically the social/technological equivalent to genes. I'm not sure if the meat of this document counts as cultural information about me that will be passed on, thereby making the world a different place.

Okay, I'm done dragging my feet. Let's get this over with.

6 things that you probably didn't know about me, but won't change your life now that you do

I was once given a wooden eggplant as a gift during a courtship. It worked.

I have only had one concussion in my life. In happened while playing pool. It did not involve a ball flying off the table, as people usually expect. Rather, it involved a ceiling fan and a pool cue. It basically happened like this: four of us were playing pool. We had invented a never-ending game that we dubbed "doubles pool". It requires four players, two teams, and two tables. If you're playing solids, your partner is playing stripes on the other table. Every time you sink a ball, it goes onto the other table. The goal is to clear all the balls of your table and sink the 8-ball but in order to do that, your opponent on the other table must be unable to sink one of fifteen balls on the other table, hence a never-ending game.

Anyway, my opponent and I were waiting for a round on the other table to finish, when I got smacked on the head and fell to the ground. I tried to get up and couldn't. It took me three tries before I successfully climbed back up to onto my feet. After trying to figure out what happened, I theorized that my friend's pool cue got into a ceiling fan, flew down and hit me in the head, and bounced back up. All that happened without my friend noticing. It happened without anybody noticing! My friend thought he almost lost a grip on his cue but there was no way it could have hit me on the head like that. Nobody at the table believed me until my friend checked the end of his cue and saw a 2 mm dent in its side that wasn't there before.

Nothing annoys me like a pen that doesn't have a cap. Not even a cap that doesn't have a pen. After years of training, I've learned not to let this govern my life, in fact I've learned to ignore it most of the time, but it's been difficult.

On a related note, I have four sharpened pencils on my desk so that if I'm scribbling something in the heat of the moment and my pencil gets too dull, I don't have to take the time to sharpen it right away.

I recently thanked somebody for giving me an excuse to read an applied mathematics textbook.

I love olives, except for canned olives. Canned olives are to me what garlic is to a vampire. I absolutely loath them. If I was given the choice of eating one cup of canned olives or one cup of dry flour, I'd pick the flour.

I have never met another oceanographer that gets nearly as seasick as me. I am fine on small boats, but on ships I suffer near-constant nausea. Everyone else seems to get over seasickness after a couple of days (if they get sick at all). I was once at sea for three weeks and didn't get over being sick. When I wasn't working, I was lying in my bed. When I was working, I was dry-heaving. Drinking liquid on an empty stomach would make me throw up, so to stay hydrated, I ate fruit between meals. Until we ran out of fruit. Then it was cucumbers. Then carrots. Then lettuce. Then olives. Canned Olives.

Despite this weakness, I still love being at sea.

Happy New Year!

2007-02-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

One way to spell relief

2007-02-18T12:52:00.000-04:00

As some of you may know, the house where Allie and I live was put up for sale some time ago. We were given this information by our landlady about 1 day before the sign went up and about 1 month after resigning the lease. She had kicked out the tenants below when their lease expired but kept us on without telling us to make the property more sell-able. The thing that had us most worried was that the lease we signed is set to expire the day before our wedding. Suddenly we thought that maybe we were going to end up married but without a home.

Well, last week the house sold. And yesterday we met our new landlord and were invited to his housewarming. We totally lucked out. He doesn't want us to leave, he doesn't want to raise the rent, and he wants to do some much-needed improvements to the house.

In addition to being a nice guy that sounds like he'll be conscientious of the folks living upstairs, his brother is married to somebody I played ultimate with in Vancouver! His brother and sister-in-law weren't at the housewarming, because they're in Kauai for the winter (poor suckers). But his mother is flying to Kauai today and is all excited that we know her other son. So we basically went from being complete strangers to practically friends of the family in, oh, I'd say about 5 minutes.

Phew.

In Memory

2007-02-15T08:27:00.000-04:00

Jeremiah was a fellow oceanographer, a fellow ultimate player, and a friend. Shortly after I left Hawaii, he married a former resident of my home there. The soon-to-be newlyweds gave me one of the most beautiful leis I'd ever seen on my last night on the islands before moving back to Canada.

A few years ago, Jeremiah left oceanography to become a science teacher at a local high school. He thrived in that role.

Earlier this week, however, he lost his life suddenly while on a field trip. From the sounds of things, he just jumped into the water on a free-dive, and that was it. He didn't resurface. By the time rescuers could get to him, it was too late.

That is the tragic news that greeted me this morning when I checked my email.

I am a little stunned today. And a little saddened. When I first got the news of his death, I didn't know what had happened but I had a feeling the ocean was involved. He was a child of the islands, and had a connection with the ocean. If there is any solace in the story of his death, it is that he was sharing his passion for the ocean environment with his students at the time.

I was not only a friend of his, but also of his wife and his father, both of whom also played ultimate. On more than one occasion, we hung out on the ultimate field when the night's games were over and the lights had gone out, sharing beers and sharing stories.

Today, my thoughts are with his wife and his young daughter. He was a positive influence in so many lives, and will be dearly missed by many.

calls for sanctions?

2007-02-14T10:30:00.000-04:00

On the anniversary of Rafik Hariri's assasination, and just after the bus bombings in Lebanon, the March 14 Coalition wants to impose sanctions on Syria?? This is nuts.

Ice Ice Baby

2007-02-14T08:27:00.000-04:00

Another cool shot from NASA's Earth Observatory:

The image has 6MB worth of detail so you can really zoom in! This is a shot of the Sea of Okhotsk (which is between Siberia and Kamchatka for all the Risk players in the room). Cold arctic outbreaks, like those that put the Canadian prairies in deep freeze from time to time, cause intense cooling sessions over this sea. When the ice - which must be almost 100% pure fresh water for it to keep its crystalline form - removes fresh water from the sea, the enhanced saltiness of the water left behind is actually enough to cause that water to sink. This heavy water will sink to the bottom of the sea, and then cascade down into the deep ocean, like a slow motion water-fall. (Interestingly the same thing happens in the Mediterranean Sea because evaporation removes water but leaves salt behind.)

A neat feature of the image is that you don't really see clouds until the wind (which is blowing offshore) gets past the ice and starts blowing over the water.

Let that flame burn

2007-02-13T16:03:00.000-04:00

Since we cannot let sween be without his lovey wife, and as it only seems right that he can have his cake (meaning his wife) and eat it (meaning his cake) too, I bring him (and you)

FLOURLESS CHOCOLATE CAKE

This recipe was given to me by my sister and copied out almost verbatim here. So, without further ado...

have all ingredients at room temperature before starting

preheat oven to 325F

grease an 8" round cake pan (NOT a springform it will leak) and line with a wax or parchment paper circle on the bottom. (pan should be deep-ish 1 1/2 to 2" deep)

In a large heatproof bowl, combine:

1 lb. semi or bittersweet chocolate (the cake will only be as good as the chocolate so don't use bakers chocolate or chips - I used one of those big gold bars of president's choice bittersweet - it's 1 lb, yummy, and is only about 5 bucks)

10 tbsp (1 1/4 sticks) butter, cut up

Set the bowl in a large skillet of barely simmering water and stir often until the chocolate and butter are warm, melted and smooth. (I hate doing it this way (although it's the proper way) and I think the boiling water risks getting a drop of water in the chocolate which, FYI, is what makes it 'seize up' when it gets all dry and thick and grainy, if you have ever experienced that - it's a chemistry thing you can read up if you want. The idea is it has to melt very slowly and not get above a certain temperature, so if you just melt the chocolate and butter in a heavy saucepan with the heat on very low and stirring often, you will be fine)

Remove melted chocolate from heat and whisk in:

5 large egg yolks

Set aside. In another large bowl, beat on medium speed (or whisk if you're feeling up to it) until soft peaks form:

5 large egg whites

1/4 tsp. cream of tartar

Gradually add, while beating:

1 tbsp sugar

Beat until the peaks are stiff but not dry. Use a rubber spatula to fold 1/4 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture, then fold in the remaining whites. Keep folding gently until there are no more streaks of egg whites. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and spread evenly. Set pan in a large shallow baking dish or roasting pan (you can get a disposable one if you ain't got) set the dish in the oven, and pour enough boiling water into it to reach halfway up the sides of the cake pan. Bake for exactly 30 minutes; the top of the cake will have a thin crust and the interior will still be gooey. Set the cake pan on a rack to cool completely, then refrigerate still in the pan until chilled or overnight (remember it tastes better the next day). To unmold, dip the cake pan in a pan of boiling water or hold over a stove element just till the cake can be inverted onto a plate (you may want to run thin knife around the cake to help detach it from the pan). Peel of the paper. The recipe says flip it over again, but I think the bottom makes a nicer top cause it's smooth. Make a doiley, etc. and sprinkle icing sugar through a sieve just before serving (if any 'sweat' has formed on the cake as it warms up, just press a paper towel to absorb it before sprinkling the sugar).

Serve with coulis and whipped cream.

COULIS:

Put in a blender or food processor:

1 pint strawberries or raspberries (or 12 oz frozen dry-packed berries, thawed)

3 tbsp sugar

1 - 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

Puree until smooth then strain through a fine meshed sieve with a spoon. Taste and add in more sugar or lemon if needed. Can be refrigerated for up to 3 days.

This title is perfect apart from its imperfections

2007-02-13T08:50:00.000-04:00

My supervisor is someone who labours over coming up with good titles for things. Papers, theses, email subjects, you name it. He always wants to get the point across as accurately as possible in as few words as possible. And he's taught me to follow that model to some extent, though admitedly I don't labour over titles of posts here all that much. Anyway, coming up with good titles can be quite the art and at times it can become an obsession. It is in this context that this headline is either terrible or amazing:

SAR Interview

2007-02-13T07:51:00.000-04:00

About a week ago, I mentioned a crazy Search and Rescue story. At the time, an interview from CBC radio was unavailable. Well, now it is.

And also, as more of an update, a letter from the rescued man.

Flubber-gusted, Arrrrrrr

2007-02-12T12:55:00.000-04:00

So, I don't have a lot of sea-going experience, but I've got enough to see this as going too far.

Some activist group was chasing down a Japanese whaling vessel in the Southern Ocean (i.e. between Antarctica and Africa/South America), which -- despite the calm seas in this picture -- is notorious for having some of the roughest seas in the world. From the sounds of things, these activists on board their ship The Robert Hunter got in the way of a whaling ship and got rammed by it, as was later reported from another one of their ships The Farley Mowat.

Now, based purely on the names of their ships, it's hard to take this activist group (the Sea Shepherds) seriously. Their actions make it even harder. As the photo above suggests, these people think of themselves somewhat as pirates, arrrrr. They tried to jam the whaling ship's propeller with ropes. They were harassing the whaling ship so much that it sent out a distress call. And they were reckless enough with their own lives and those of the sailors on board the whaling ship, that they forced two collisions, one of which left a gash in their hull! Apparently, they also temporarily lost a couple of their members who were in a small raft. Luckily for those in the raft, they were found.

Now, while Japanese "scientific whaling" operations may be suspicious, there is a limit as to what should be done to stop them. The adventure of almost getting killed while acting like a stupid-ass pirate (arrrrr) in one of the most treacherous oceans might get your adrenaline going, but I must say these people are idiots. Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't exactly call myself an advocate of whaling or a believer of the science Japan uses to suggest commercial whaling should be brought back into full practice. In fact, I think they need to be stopped. Whether you agree with the law or not, these whalers were acting within international law, so don't think you're being some hero by hating the player.

You want to go change the world? Great! Be my guest. Go lobby, generate attention through civil disobedience, do your thing. But try not to get yourself killed in the process. And maybe while you're at it, try not to threaten the safety of other people's lives, either. What would have happened if somebody was actually killed here?

In parting, I'll just close with a shot of the "R/V" Farley Mowat (that stands for "Research Vessel"...riiiiight) with a Pirate Flag! Arrrr!

Gotta love the Canadian flag and the pirate flag! Um, excuse me, Arrrrr, eh? Oh, you don't like pirates, sorry.

That's random

2007-02-09T12:04:00.000-04:00

Why is it that when I find this site funny it happens to be mirroring the most unusual events in my life, like the challenge involved in getting a computer to give you a truly random number. Which is why today's xkcd comic is so fitting:

What makes this even weirder is that this is C code. I almost never program in C. But I happen to be for my random number application.

Really, this shouldn't be that funny. Today, however, it is.

you are here...

2007-02-07T18:09:00.000-04:00

In response to themikestand's request about our whereabouts in this post...

That yellow dot on the Atlantic coast is approximately Halifax (my version of here). North is to the right in the picture. West is to the top of the picture.

The yellow dot near the horizon is where I do my field work.

The red dot is the Bay of Fundy.

The green dot is Cape Breton. (Those white parallel clouds are internal waves that formed as wind blows over the highlands.)

Are you happy? Only if you are...

2007-02-07T15:49:00.000-04:00

This is Benj:
Behind him at the Car Museum in L.A. is his favourite car, Herbie.

Benj and I have had a special friendship for as long as I've known. He is five years my elder, but when we met (I think I was about 4) we hit it off and became instant best friends.

Benj was handed mental and physical disabilities at birth, which is the first thing anyone will notice when they see him. However, he also has an amazing charisma and infectious love for life. This charisma made him a local celebrity on our street where we grew up as next-door neighbours. Everyone knew him, and everyone took care of him. He could walk out his front door in downtown Toronto at 8 p.m., and his family knew he would be fine. When I first met him we were of comprable "mental age". We would have fun riding our Big Wheels together or stomping on ants on the sidewalk.

As we grew up, however, this changed. At some point I became aware of what was happening...I was growing up faster than him. This was hard to take, and for a few years our friendshp suffered. But with time, I learned to accept this change in our friendship. It went from having a best friend to having a younger cousin or a younger brother. One of his most common questions to me was "Are you happy?" to which my truthful reply was "Only if you are". He became someone I would always want to take care of and always want to have fun with. Suddenly I realized that our relationship haddened actually changed...everything was always about having fun.

His house became a haven for me where I could escape the stresses of everyday adolescence, be it due to school or family or girls or anything else. No matter what was happening, we just continued to fly kites, catch frogs at the pond, watch Herbie movies, or play Hungry Hippos. Throughout my adolescence, we stayed great friends. I wrote essays about our friendship during highschool, and two television documentaries talked about our friendship. In the first one I was 5 and didn't have much to say, but in the second I was 15 and got interviewed extensively. That one ends with me saying something to the effect of:

Sometimes I wonder what will happen. I won't live here forever. What if I move or I go to university and move to another city? [pause] I know we'll stay friends forever.

Two years after the filming, I moved halfway across town. Then I left Toronto to study the in Montreal and Vancouver. Somewhere during that time Benj and his mom moved to L.A. where is two sisters were already living. As I predicted at the awkward age of 15, we've kept in touch. In the two visits I've made to California since he moved there, I've spent a couple of days visiting him. I have asked him to be in my wedding party, and he has accepted and is excited about it.

This week I discovered a something new about Benj. There has been a book published about him. There is something very special about this book. It is written by his mother. Benj's mother is a clinical psychologist that specializes in children with disabilities. So in a sense, he is very lucky to be have been born to her. She knows how to help Benjamin live a full life.

Benj's mother has encouraged his interests and helped his development always. Whether it was getting a dog or a turtle, or learning to play the harp (the Harp!!), or joining the local bowling league, or playing hockey, or finding temp work, she has made it happen. Thanks in no small part to her, Benj is a hard worker, an accomplished athlete, and a musician. He lives a very full life, and is one of the most sincerely happy people you could ever hope to meet.

As I told his mother in a recent letter to her, I am very excited about this book. It is both a personal and a professional description of his development, and will give me a deeper insight into one of the most important people in my life. And in addition, just thinking about reading this book is reminding me of everything our friendship has meant over the years.

Apple webpage evolution

2007-02-07T08:11:00.000-04:00

A Flickr member who goes by the name of Kernel Panic and is clear a Mac-phile has made an effort to document the evolution of the apple.com homepage over the years. I don't know if this is a complete list, but it's impressive all the same.

Some are neat, some are less neat. But this is the oddest one of the collection (when the Mac page was hacked in 1997)...

Then there's the arrogant ones...

And the whole "think different" campaign...

And of course, their commeration of cultural legends...

And this one taught me that I'm older than Apple, though only just slightly.

Rescue on Mount Seymour, BC

2007-02-05T12:03:00.000-04:00

Last week on CBC Radio's Sounds Like Canada, I heard an interview with Tim Jones (See February 1st - I have asked CBC if they will be making that interview available but have not yet heard back. I will post a link to the interview if it becomes available).

The interview gives a first person recount of a somewhat remarkable rescue by North Shore Rescue in Vancouver, which actually got them a lot of press. I was so taken by the story, I wanted to find other recounts of it. I found one on the team blog. (A SAR team with a blog? And one of the busiest teams in the country, too?? Maybe we should do that...)

I'm not going to cut and paste from the story because the whole thing is just amazing. As a teaser, it involves 1000' falls, helicopter rescues, collapsing shelters in poor weather, and searchers surviving avalanches. Our team has an expression, "the harder you train, the luckier you get". Though the narrator of this story is a little modest, it is clear that this team didn't just get lucky on this one.

I thought of joining North Shore Rescue many years ago when I lived in Vancouver, but after reading their site I realized I wasn't their ideal candidate since I had no mountaineering experience. This story confirms that thought.

52 weeks ago today

2007-02-03T15:31:00.000-04:00

Fifty-two weeks ago (plus or minus a couple of hours), I was sitting on a big flat rock on the side of Long Lake, just outside Halifax. I wasn't alone. With me was my lady friend, Allie.

The weeks leading up to that point by the lake had been rather hectic. I had been preparing for a departmental seminar and a conference, and Allie was studying hard for an exam. But we managed to sneak off on a nice warm February afternoon to go for a hike. It was a beautiful walk through the woods with a light mist blowing through the trees. Normally I would not remember these sorts of details a week after the fact, let alone a year, but this hike was going to be a special one. Unbeknown to Allie, I had a ring zipped away in my pocket, and today I was going to stop worrying about her finding it in my sock drawer.

As we walked along the trail through the woods, I was looking for nice spots with scenic views. Noticing one particular spot, I decided we'd have to visit it on the way back. So after walking by a waterfall, and balancing across some fallen trees, all the while hearing the drips of melting snow on a warm day, we stopped at this sun-warmed rock looking over the lake to have a little chat.

Allie, being Allie, was in the mood to talk, which was good. Today she had chosen the topic, How lonely and miserable my life would be if I had never met her. I'm not kidding. What could be better?

Apparently in all of Halifax, she had determined it would have been absolutely impossible for me to ever find anyone as good for me as her.

"Um, yeah, about that," I sheepishly interjected upon deaf ears.

In fact, it sure was a good thing I went to Montreal when I did, and a good thing that I happened to meet her when I did, otherwise who knows what would have become of her and then I would never have met her and I'd be doomed to a love life of failure worthy of its own ongoing saga on some cartoon TV-series^*.

At this point I had the ring in my hand - clutched very tightly because I was not dropping this thing into the lake - but the conversation was starting to drift a little past where the time seemed right.

So I waited for a good time, and I tried to steer the conversation back...

... and I waited ...

... and I waited some more ....

and then Allie said, "Well, we better get back to the car before it gets dark." And with that she shuffled off the rock, turned her back to the lake, and started walking back up to the trail.

Quickly, and with mountain goat grace I might add, I managed to scramble to a nearby gravel shoreline. It was there that I mustered all of my intellectual ability to compose the most incredibly suave statement that would both woo her and delay her return to the trail. "Hold on a second."

And I walked up to her.

And I looked at her.

And she looked at me.

And I paused.

And I asked myself why I didn't rehearse this out-loud at least once.

And I took a deep breath.

And before I could say anything her eyes got really big -- I mean saucer big.

"What?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing," she said bashfully.

"No, what is it?"

"Um, I thought you were - well this is going to sound silly - I thought you were going to get on one knee."

And then, with my whole poorly-scripted plan quashed, I just went with the flow and got on one knee. And I said some garble and probably stuttered. And I offered her the ring. And she accepted it.

^{* To be fair to Allie, I may have embellished this part only slightly.}

More coccolithophores!

2007-01-31T07:55:00.000-04:00

This follows up on yesterday's post. Only this time, the photo is a little closer to home.

(from Emiliania Huxleyi's home page)

When scientists follow cobblers

2007-01-30T14:21:00.000-04:00

On the Wikipedia site for goodness of fit

Goodness-of-fit actually refers to the degree to which a shoe conforms to the wearers foot. The term was co-opted by academicians in the early twentieth century, and is used to describe the the degree to which you can force your preconcieved notions to be upheld by the results of your statistical tests (aka. the anti apriori approach).

A world within a world

2007-01-30T08:49:00.000-04:00

This shot was taken by a NASA satellite.

It, along with probably thousands of fascinating images, are available at NASA's EarthObservatory site. Each shot has a great explanation of what it is you're looking at.

Personally, I love the ones like this. Swirls within the ocean visualized by phytoplankton. Undersatnding the dynamics is complicated because the lifespan of the eddies is different from the lifespan of the phytoplankton that make them dramatically visible. Nonetheless, you can see the ocean being "stirred" (I can trace lines in and around the swirls) as well as the ocean being "mixed" (where did that swirl go, anyway?) You will see the same thing if you stir your coffee and then put milk in it.

Incidently, these phytoplankton are probably a specific kind called coccolithophores and more specifically, Emeliania Huxleyi. This is what they look like under the microscope:

Now here is where things get kind of fascinating, I think. The top figure has a scale bar 10 kilometres. The bottom one has a scale of microns. There are 1 billion microns in a kilometre.
--
1 billion! To put that number in perspective, if you had 1 billion pennies, you'd need more than forty 40-foot containers to store them. So think of how many of these little guys must be in that picture.

Also, those little plates on the the coccoloilthophore are called coccoliths. They are made of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and, to make a long story short, it is thought that the export of the their shells into the sediments is a way to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. So if the ocean is going to be the vector by which carbon dioxide is removed from our atmosphere, it is possible that we'll need to count on our friends in the satellite photo to do the dirty work.

busy

2007-01-29T12:20:00.000-04:00

Sorry it's been quiet for the last few days...it'll probably stay like that this week. I'm hunkered down for a little while. After another realization, it looks like I'm now turning this into a review paper and a methods paper (but still one paper).

Translation: Too much work, too little time.

(picture borrowed from PhD Comics)

Monolithic actions

2007-01-26T13:44:00.000-04:00

This is too funny. An emeritus scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada was apparently dismissed (but quickly reinstated) because he felt it was stupid that "Canada’s New Government" should replace "Government of Canada" in official correspondence. Somewhat embarrassing that something this ridiculous has been published in Harper's.

(Via Rick Mercer's Blog.)

A stirring thought

2007-01-26T10:28:00.000-04:00

So, after that last post, I thought I should give something a little lighter.

I can't remember where exactly I found this image (somewhere on the NASA site, I think), but it is absolutely phenomenal.
There are a lot of neat things to point out:

First off, what are all those colours in the ocean?
That's an estimate of how much chlorophyll (and kind of how much phytoplankton) are present. Based on the colour of the ocean viewed from space, some smart people have come up with ways to estimate the ocean's chlorophyll content.

See that yellowish oval south of the Bay of Fundy and east of Cape Cod?
That's Georges Bank. Due to some very neat physics that I won't get into, the waters there get well mixed and trapped over the bank. This results in a productive hot spot seen in this image.

See those grey swirls just off the Labrador coast?
I'm not positive on that one but I think that's ice! Ice being stirred and sheared. If you zoom in, it looks amazingly similar to those colours in the ocean. (I remember once I got an exam question that said nothing more than "Ice is a metamorphic rock. Explain." I wish I had this picture.)

See that donut-looking lake in the middle of Quebec?
If I remember correctly, that's from a meteor impact. The middle rebounded but edges were depressed enough to make that lake.

See the clouds making a ring just east of Newfoundland?
That's a low pressure system. You can tell because the "spinning" is in a counter-clockwise direction which, in the northern hemisphere, means a low pressure system.

Okay, I could keep going here, and maybe I will later on, but that's it for now. I just think this image is very cool.

An uncertain future

2007-01-26T08:50:00.000-04:00

I'm not going to write too much about this, because it can easily become too emotional of a topic. But to keep things short, here's what's been occupying my thoughts.
The NY Times
The Daily Star
Rampurple
From Beirut to the Beltway

And to think that less than two years ago, the country felt more hope than it probably has in the last 30 years. It saddens me to think that it went from this

to this

Well, I guess it's time for me to instead start thinking about this:

Bean-counting the State of the Union Address

2007-01-24T08:21:00.000-04:00

As you may know, Bush gave his State of the Union Address yesterday. It took 67 minutes. Out of curiosity, I Perled the manuscript to death to find out what the key points were:

Times that

terror, terrorism, or terrorist were mentioned: 22

Al Qaeda was mentioned: 8

Saddam Hussein was mentioned: 19

Iraq or Iraqi were mentioned: 22

Iran was mentioned: 3

North Korea was mentioned: 7

China was mentioned: 1

Russia was mentioned: 1

America or American was mentioned: 59

war was mentioned: 17

economy or economic were mentioned: 13

congress was mentioned: 14

environment was mentioned: 4

medicare was mentioned: 5

God was mentioned: 4

Bush paused for applause: 77

Bienvenida a Tijuana

2007-01-23T14:58:00.000-04:00

So it appears as though currupt police officers in Tijuana have forced a rather unusual situation:

President Felipe Calderon sent 3,300 soldiers and federal police to Tijuana last week to hunt down drug gangs. The soldiers swept police stations and took officers' guns for inspection on Thursday amid allegations that some officers supported smugglers who traffic drugs into the U.S.

That was 3 weeks ago, and the officers still have not had their guns returned. One effect of this move has been that police have been receiving death threats from local thugs. They've been travelling either with the army as their escorts or in large numbers for protection. In search of a reasonable solution, it seems that the Tijuana police department, some 2,000 strong, have issued a total of 60 slingshots to their officers...

!Aye Caramba!

Win your own plane

2007-01-23T08:16:00.000-04:00

This offer comes from the same company that brings you Ivana Trump's La Residence in downtown Beirut, which, by the way, looks like this:
All you need to do is buy property in Dubai.

(via rampurple)

Priorities

2007-01-22T11:01:00.000-04:00

Overheard while watching the Patriots-Colts game last night...

To me, recording a live football game is like getting someone else to impregnate your wife.

Notable Quotable

2007-01-20T11:28:00.000-04:00

Isaac Asimov once claimed,

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'

I stumbled upon one of those moments on Friday, which ends up offering an alternate title for today's post: why I'm spending my weekend rewriting a series of predictive models that I built over the last 3 months

The speed of light isn't really that constant

2007-01-19T17:03:00.000-04:00

Okay, now this hit me like a sack of wheat. Somewhere, a long time ago it was ingrained in me that the speed of light is 300,000 kilometres per second. Einstein's theory of relativity is based on the concept that nothing goes faster than light. Once you convince yourself of that, you're off into the world of relativistic physics and you're almost ready to program satellites that need to be sent to Jupiter and beyond. You've bought into the concept that light always travels at the speed of light and that nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

So. I just learned that there are people out there that have been halting light. Now while I concede that you are always taught that 300,000 km/sec is the speed of light in a vacuum, and that it is slightly different in different media (hence Snell's Law), it is still pretty trippy to think that in certain media it is slowed to a snails pace. (Can you imagine light going at under 40 miles per hour? You could pass it on the highway...C'mon light! Step on it or get out of the passing lane!)

The application of this concept is that if you can harness light, you can essentially label atoms for microseconds which is apparently long enough for the information to be used as a quantum microchip. If this ever falls into practice, it would be like handing a calculator to a guy trying to calculate the squareroot of 23409 on an abacus.

...

Oh no, I think I'm experiencing a majorly nerdy geek bomb...

Snow Driving

2007-01-19T11:18:00.000-04:00

So the west coast has been hit by some bad snow storms lately, creating havoc among drivers. This video taken from a balcony in Portland shows you how to play billiards with your car on an icy hill:

And, on a related note, this one goes out to Templeton and Lil' Lightnin', for their little fling in the snow last year (their version was a little more successful than what transpires in this video):

What happens when you pluck the ocean?

2007-01-18T19:19:00.001-04:00

Have you ever wondered why A440 sounds different on a piano compared to a violin? And then different again on a flute? Well, the short answer seems awfully simple and almost stupid: it's because the instruments make different sounds.

Anybody who has ever played a violin or a guitar or any other string instrument has probably noticed that there are two main things that affect what note comes off a string when you pluck it: the string length and the string thickness. When you pluck the string, the sound you get is due to how the string vibrates, and then how that vibration resonates within the instrument. Most of what you hear is the pitch of the note you plucked. But the richness of the tone of the instrument, that stuff that makes the violin sound different from the guitar, is due to all the other sounds that also resonate.

The exact physics of that difference in sound becomes very complicated very quickly. For example, most violins look more or less the same, but can sound drastically different from one another. It is because of subtle differences that every violin sounds different. Science describes these differences using tools called eigenvalues and eigenvectors. If you took first year Algebra in university you were probably exposed to these things, and you probably hated them.

In a nutshell, the reason instruments sound different from one another is because when you play a note, a whole bunch of other sound waves (lets call them modes) are also emitted from the instrument when it resonates. Which other sound waves (modes) are excited, and how loud they are relative to one another, is what makes a piano sound different from a squealing toddler. As luck should have it, these modes must obey the rules of some specific mathematical equation. Solving the equation may be quite simple for something like a drum, but can get very complicated for something like a violin. This is because the equation takes into account the shape of the object and its composition (e.g. if it is made of plastic or wood or crystal). Not just any random mode will satisfy the equation, only very specific ones do. These very specific modes are called eigenvectors and each one has an eigenvalue associated with it.

If you ever saw the movie the Red Violin, you might remember scenes where million-dollar isntruments are being tested with equipment resembling oscilloscopes. The scientists there would basically be examining how the instrument resonated, or in science-babble they would be determining what its eigenvectors were.

Q: So why are you writing all this, who cares, and what does it have to do with the ocean?

Well, often when people ask me what I do, I have a hard time explaining it. On the bus home yesterday I came up with an analogy to plucking strings on an instrument. Lately I've been fitting my ocean data to the eigenvectors of the Saint Lawrence Estuary near Tadoussac. You see, the tides "pluck" the ocean at specific frequencies, but then physics causes all these other waves to resonate as well. The speed and shape of the resonated waves are governed by the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the water column, constrained by Newton's second law and the assumption that matter is not created or destroyed. By knowing which eigenvectors to look for, I've been trying to find specific waves in my data, separate them from everything else in my data, and then figure out which bloody direction they're going.

Will Moore's Law Be Broken?

2007-01-18T14:57:00.001-04:00

Found on iTWire (via Slashdot):

Nano-scale architecture developed in the research labs of Hewlett-Packard could beat Moore's Law and advance the progress of of microprocessor development three generations in one hit. The new architecture uses a design technique that will enable chip makers to pack eight times as many transistors as is currently possible.

From my basic understanding, Moore's Law is an empirical relationship showing the number of transistors within a state-of-the-art computer chip (which is what controls how fast your computer is) doubles every two years. Hence, if you bought your computer two years ago, the new computers are twice as fast. If this report is true, we'll be getting an unexpected 6-year jump in computer speed...

Time for a Coffee Break

2007-01-18T10:48:00.000-04:00

I just spent two minutes looking for my coffee mug. When I finally found it, it was about two inches from my keyboard, upon which I have been typing for the last two and a half hours. It was sitting where it always sits, it was in plain sight, and there was nothing else around it to clutter my vision or camouflage it.

Now I just hope I can find the coffee pot.

Well, if you want my opinion...

2007-01-17T08:43:00.000-04:00

Zogby International has released results of a recent poll it took in Lebanon. The poll examines, among other things, opinions of the recent war between Hizbullah and Israel. (A PDF of the results are here.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the results show divisions of opinion along religious lines.

Who was the big winner?
Almost all major groups felt Hizbullah had won the war. A large proportion of the Shiite population felt the Lebanese people won the war. Only the Christian demographic, who's opinion was essentially split equally, felt Israel won the war.

Who was the big loser?
According to the Shiites, it was Israel. According to everyone else, it was the Lebanese people.

Post-war attitude towards Hizbullah
The Shiite population has a more positive view, everyone else has a more negative view.

The poll also asked about the general situation between Israel and the Palestinians, the war in Iraq, and Iran. (via Abu Aardvark.)

On a note related to the recent Hizbollah-Israel conflict, it seems Israel is judging that it lost the conflict. The IDF cheif has stepped down and there are calls for the resignation of the prime minister and the defence minister.

Personally, I do not see any clear winner and I feel the Lebanese people were the real losers. Huh, that's what the poll predicts I would think...

The Inconvenient Truth

2007-01-16T17:47:00.001-04:00

Last night, I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth. I have to admit that I had not been expecting it to be so good. Gore does an absolutely phenomenal job of taking the key points regarding the science of climate change, and distilling the information down to a form that is very easy to understand - even intuitive. Sure, there's some politcal and personal commentary, but that's not the meat of the presentation. None of global warming issues he discusses is really on flimsy scientific ground. He doesn't always give you the "how we know" but most of the time he does. If you have not yet seen this movie, you should.

Amazing Rescue

2007-01-16T08:54:00.000-04:00

Wow!

Some quick thoughts:

Never give up (as the searcher or the searchee). Attitude is everything in these scenarios. Chances are that if this woman had given up, she would not have been found alive.

Lost people almost always travel further than you intuitively expect. For that reason, proper SAR techniques (which are used in surprisingly few places) will use past statistics to allocate search resources.

It's always an emergency, even after 3 weeks. Though she was in decent shape when the brothers came across her, she was severely hypothermic when the rescuers got to her. It's probably a good thing that the rescuers flew in as soon as they could.

somewhat disconcerting...

2007-01-15T11:08:00.000-04:00

So, maybe everyone already knows this, but I just found out. I was thinking a little about climate change, and the common perceptions and misperceptions about it. With that in mind, I thought I'd see what information is immediately available...and entered "climate change" in google.ca, then hit "I feel lucky". The top hit is the Government of Canada site which I've copied and pasted in its entirety right here:
Classy, eh? The best part, if you look at the fine print at the bottom, is that this page has been like this since June! I guess we should just avoid talking about the elephant in the room.

legit?

2007-01-15T09:07:00.000-04:00

Thank you xkcd.

What's black and white all over?

2007-01-15T08:40:00.000-04:00

So you know that riddle, why don't polar bears eat penguins? (If you don't know the answer, I'll leave it for you to solve. But below are a few hints...)

In today's Guardian, there is an article about these guys who are trying to ski across Antarctica. It's an interesting adventure story type deal, and the protagonists seem to fit the stereotype, even having an "Ovary Award".

But I digress...

Somewhere near the end of the article, is a little blurb about how this is not a purely selfish endeavour.

The team ... has spent time scouring the horizons for penguin colonies. If penguin numbers are great enough, the continent may have enough natural food to support a limited number of polar bears in an ambitious relocation programme to save the Arctic bears from the perils of climate change.

Okay, so a couple of points...

Don'tcha think that maybe qualified bird spotters who can quantify what they are seeing should do this job?
Am I the only one that feels that, you know, since we're just about done screwing up the polar bear's habitat, maybe we shouldn't just accelerate our meddling with the antarctic ecosystem?

I mean seriously...do these people know anything about the antarctic? Did they research penguins at all? Maybe they should go see March of the Penguins, and imagine a Polar Bear stumbling upon that colony of emperor penguins balancing their eggs on their feet during their over-wintering...

The kid's got moves

2007-01-14T08:03:00.000-04:00

Man, back when I was 13, I barely had a wrist shot...

(via my friend Ross)

Abstract Message

2007-01-13T12:26:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've been listing to music I haven't heard in a long time. Today is an example of that. I've been taking in music from Q-Burns Abstract Message. During most of the time I spent writing code for my Masters thesis, I also listened to Q-Burns Abstract Message. I could have a CD on repeat for 6 hours and not notice the time go by. Several of my roommates started to put his music on when they were doing all-night projects in their architecture program. It's that kind of rave-like D.J. music that makes time pass quickly while somehow helping you zone into whatever you're doing.

Today is another coding day, and I felt like seeing what Mr. Burns is up to these days...

It's different from what he was pumping out in 1999, but it still good background music if you're deep in computer code.