Apple webpage evolution

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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)