| Creatine |
[May. 18th, 2009|12:47 pm] |
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I've started taking creatine lately. This is after reading about it from several sources. It seems to be of particular benefit to vegetarians. So... we'll see how it does! |
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| Roadtrip! |
[Apr. 20th, 2009|01:20 pm] |
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This weekend I'm off to St. Louis. This will be my first substantial trip on my motorcycle, though I have been out for some ~40 minute rides in the middle of the night lately. Those have been really fun. I've discovered that verything is beautiful in the middle of the night on a motorcycle... but I intend to keep this trip within daylight hours. I've been glancing at maps, and it looks like I'm doing the historic route 66 from Joliet to St. Louis. My bike is still in the break-in period, so I shouldn't take it out on highway 55. To be nice to the engine it looks like I'll be averaging 50-55 mph. Which is cool. Ride within my limits and all... and also, remembering the wind farm in Indiana... no idea what I might see that you can't see from the main highway. Must bring a better camera than my laptop! |
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| Kallisti studying how to draw... |
[Apr. 19th, 2009|05:49 pm] |
Kallisti has begun studying how to draw from xkcd (http://xkcd.com), which is just awesome.
Oh, also XKCD related, when driving back from visiting family in southern Indiana we drove through this huge windmill farm. It was very surreal. I had no idea these huge things were out there. They were beautiful but also just very... unnerving. Something about the simplicity of their form and their enormous size.
( Image behind the cut )
And then I came across this XKCD, so right on: http://xkcd.com/556/ |
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| Busy day |
[Apr. 18th, 2009|08:56 pm] |
Kallisti and I went downtown today. First thing we parked in the loop and, after chasing a few pigeons we went up to the L. We got on and rode around the loop and back. When we got off the conductor asked if we were going to the sears tower, he was surprised that riding the L was the reason we were in the loop. We looked up at the Sears (or ahem, Willis) Tower, but trains are more fun.
From there we went to China town to buy some candy. One of my classmates was supposed to hang out with us, but she cancelled due to some personal drama. So we just got the candy and went on to the field museum.
We were there primarily to see dinosaurs, but wandered around aimlessly from exhibit to exhibit. We kept getting distracted on the way to the dinos, it was much fun. I like the way they've done the dinosaurs now, in context of overall life evolving and talking about extinctions. As a kid I just remember them being haphazardly arranged in a big room. Kallisti had us sit and watch all the video clips, she especially liked the ones about "brontosaurus".
After the museum we went out and rolled down hills outside :-D |
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| Need proper motorcycle gear |
[Apr. 12th, 2009|06:36 pm] |
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So I threw on my leather jacket and helmet (of course), and got out on a rural highway to check out what it felt like travelling at speed. The bike felt great, my jacket, not so great. It's a lightweight leather jacket, and at that speed it was flapping in the wind like crazy. I could feel it pulling back on me, making me and the bike feel less stable. I imagine a proper fitting motorcycle jacket would make a huge difference at those speeds. Also, I left without my gloves... which was just silly. My fingers are frozen! |
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| Got my license |
[Apr. 10th, 2009|09:09 pm] |
I passed the written and riding exam this morning so now I've got my motorcycle license. Lots of time was spent preparing in from of my house. I borrowed my daughter sidewalk chalk to draw out parts of the course on the street. She also helped me practice by riding the course I marked out with her bicycle ;-D
I'm still signed up for the motorcycle riders course, I'll probably pick up some good tips and it is good for the insurance rates.
Anyway, I'm pretty proud of myself and glad I don't have to worry anymore.
Next weekend, or the weekend after depending on the weather, I'll be off on my first road trip down to St. Louis. I'm still in the break-in period on the bike, so I'm not supposed to rev the engine up to highway speeds, so I'm looking at taking other routes to get down there. I'm excited. |
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| Meh, don't need motorcycle instructor... |
[Mar. 25th, 2009|11:52 am] |
Whee, I've got my Ninja. It is very green, a Kawasaki Ninja 250. Learning to ride, watching vids on youtube. This morning I actually drove to a gas station and filled it up, whee. $5 of 93 octane fills the tank about 3/4 of the way. It is a lot of fun. I just got it Monday. Except for the gas station I'm just riding around the neighborhood. Maybe I'll be ready for the license exam this weekend. I feel totally comfortable on it, the handling is totally intuitive. Only problem is I still haven't got the clutch mastered. Every now and then I get it backwards and release the clutch while braking and thus stall the bike, but I'm making that mistake less and less.
I signed up for the JJC riding program, but the only standby seat I could get was in June, I'll almost certainly have my license by then, but completing the course may help insurance... |
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| Need a motorcycle instructor |
[Mar. 4th, 2009|05:33 pm] |
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If anyone knows someone than knows how to ride, please contact me. I want to get my license and get a bike in the next two weeks but I can't find any classes until April... Help! I'd be willing to pay in cash or drinks or...? |
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| Should we help people pay their mortgages? |
[Feb. 20th, 2009|03:41 pm] |
Yes. Within reason, and from all I know Obama's plan in well within reason, yes. Am I bothered that we are "encouraging bad behaviour?" No. I've plotted a course in my life that has paid off and we can make our payments, but there was quite a bit of luck involved. I just saw that rant on CBS by that Santelli asshole... fucking asshole. You know what? Traders aren't a cross section of the populace. Traders are fucking assholes. They're the ones that have been running this economy into the ground. It is their fault, the market's fucking fault that companies are driven to self-destruction for short term gain. It is their fault that these people have lost jobs and it is their fault that people were encouraged to get mortgages they can't afford... just fucking pisses me off.
Anyway, yes, I'm one of those people that can pay my mortgage and I think this plan is an excellent idea... |
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| Unexpected plumbing |
[Feb. 10th, 2009|10:15 am] |
So I look like I've been fighting with cats. My arms are all scratched up... but at least we have running water again, and not running on the floor.
Sunday evening I decided to replace a leaky shutoff valve on our water heater. It had been leaking since it was installed about six years ago, about a drop a minute or two. That was enough to make some serious rust around where the pipe goes into it. When I went to disconnect the old valve, rather than unscrewing from the tank, the pipe going into the tank twisted around, breaking down inside the water heater. I didn't realize how screwed I was at the time, and went about replacing the valve, and doing a pretty shitty job at it too. (I hate working with copper pipe. I used to think it was neat, but I hate it now.)
Anyway, I get the valve hooked up and turn it on and it leaks out of the top of the tank, all around where it is rusted. So I get some epoxy to try to stem the tide... to no avail. So I skip work and class yesterday. We go to home depot and order a new water heater installed and I start working like a madman to rip out all the old iron pipe I can. I just barely was able to rerun the water to the heater in time to hook it up. Yay, for CPVC! It took until about 8 pm last night before everything was hooked up again. I'm getting pretty good at this now. Unfortunately I used the wrong glue on most of the pipes I've put up, but oh well. It is holding and not leaking, so I have little motivation to replace the joints right now. Maybe in a couple months I'll get back to it and finish taking out the iron pipes. *whew*
So this is another random skill I am building up. Whee. |
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| Atheist Coven |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|03:21 pm] |
Next Sunday is the Solstice, lot to do to be ready for that! So, without further delay...
Announcing the atheist coven! This is the brainchild of myself and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) magikmama. She is more than welcome to refine, contradict, or otherwise disagree with any of the below, as is anyone else! Anyway, here's the idea!
Lot's of us have gotten into magick, ritual, witchcraft, mysticism, etc. because we wanted to better understand spiritual experiences. We wanted to know God, ourselves, the meaning of life. Along the way, many of us have found that we don't quite believe in God or even believe in the supernatural. We're not atheists in the normal sense, because we didn't come at this with some sort of grudge against religion. We like the ritual, the feeling of deep significance and connection. Perhaps in a way like how adults still enjoy santa, we still enjoy religion. That is what this coven is about, religion and ritual without the necessity to believe in absurd things. It is a coven to have fun with being a coven and not get hung up on metaphysical whatnot. We'll do whatever feels right, basically making religion what it should have been all along.
So, who's in?
I'd like to get something together for the Solstice this Sunday. That doesn't leave much time. We need a space, a time and some sort of plan. I'll offer my house as the space if a better one isn't available, but Joliet as a location kinda sucks and the house isn't really set for guests... We need to figure out which deities will be invited. I'll start by nominating Maat/Themis and Eris (never make the mistake of not inviting Eris to your party!) Other suggestions are some sort of dying god figure, Osiris maybe, and I'm always a fan of Horus. Bast is a favorite, as is Babylon (but what kind of party do we want this to be?!) Nuit is ever present as is Hadit, so we don't need to speak of them... anyway, who'd you want to mention? What sort of ritual would you propose? |
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| The Pusher |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|11:42 am] |
This is a bit of writing I was working on this morning. It is really the same scene that I wrote out some time back. I'm just starting to get the urge to write now, make this into a real story. Anyway, here it is as it came together this morning.
( Read more... ) |
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| Writer's Block: Full Moon Fever |
[Dec. 13th, 2008|11:18 am] |
Definitely. Perhaps due to all the artificial light we have it isn't as pronounced as it once was, but the moon definitely has its effects on us. It is especially noticeable during long winter nights the winter. A clear winder night with a bright moon and the everything coated in snow is quite an image. I'm a pretty skeptical person, but denying the influence of the moon would is just silly. After all, the moon's influence is deeply emotional, people say they are affected by it, it is like being moved by a poem or a painting, just because you can't muster a logical explanation doesn't make it less real. I can't really define how the moon affects me.
The moon is a light in dark times, but it cannot be relied upon. Its strength waxes and wanes and can be so easily obscured by a bit of cloud. It has no light of its own and thought it appears bright, that is only because of our natural state of darkness. It signifies some strange secret life, but is itself dead, battered and lifeless. And while it appears brilliant at night, a full moon during the day is almost comical as it continues to shine its borrowed light unaware of the needlessness of its presence. |
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| "Rocked" |
[Dec. 8th, 2008|12:37 pm] |
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One more random sorta language thing... just saw a headline: "Greece rocked by third day of riots". "Rocked" is a popular word for headlines and I always associate it with rock 'n roll, "rocked the club" sorta thing. So I always read those and my first association is something like "Those must be some awesome riots!" or "That earthquake kicked ass!" Am I the only one that has to read those headlines twice? |
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| Ear pierced |
[Sep. 29th, 2008|01:40 pm] |
I've been meaning to get my ear pierced for a while now. For whatever reason, Saturday night seemed like the night to do it. There was a straight pin handy in the bathroom and before I thought to long about it I poked it through my ear. K helped me cut the pin down and the next day we went and got a 20 gauge ring for it. After a fight to get the ring through the whole and another fight to get the damn bead back in the ring... I now have my first piercing. Woo. It looks a bit lonely, but next one I'll probably get done professionally.
It's a little bit sore, but I don't think it's infected. Once it's been in a few weeks I think I'll move up to an 18 or 16 gauge ring. |
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| Temperature as ratio variable |
[Aug. 26th, 2008|05:26 pm] |
(From a debate with my statistics teacher)
Temperature, in Celsius, is an equal-interval variable, but when temperature is measured in Kelvin it is definitely a ratio variable. That is to say, while 84 Celsius is *not* twice as hot as 42 Celsius, 84 Kelvin *is* twice as hot as 42 Kelvin.
Here's why: As we both know, the Celsius scale was created by measuring the expansion of mercury. The zero point was made to correspond to the freezing point of water. The mercury could expand beyond that zero mark some amount or shrink below it, so we can have positive or negative temperature. The scale is equal interval because the marks on the thermometer are equally spaced. I'm sure we agree so far...
Now, physicists knew that heat flowed from hot objects to cold objects and the going theory that this was because of the action of a material they called phlogiston. Well, suppose phlogiston turned out to be a real substance and that phlogiston was attracted or repelled from objects proportional to the heat of the object as recorded in Celsius. Let's say the force on the phlogiston is F and the temperature is t. We can state now that F = k * t (where k is some constant) or F / t = k. Put another way, there is a constant *ratio* of F to t. The reason it is a ratio variable is because it can be used in this sort of mathematical expression, but it depends on what you want to infer from the data whether it can be treated as a ratio.
In like manner, temperature in Kelvin was found to be a useful measurement in many different ways and it is used as a ratio such as in the ideal gas law (pv=nrT). So it is a ratio variable *because* it is useful in this ratio. It could not be used as a ratio variable if we were trying to deduce the perception of cold...
What I'm trying to get at is that the distinction between an ratio variable and a mere equal-interval variable depends on how the variable can be used to predict the values of other variables.
UPDATE: She said in class today that actually I was right! :-D |
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| Notetaking just wastes time... |
[Aug. 26th, 2008|02:33 pm] |
My organic chemistry class is really depressing. We were doing review today of some very basic concepts, valence electrons, atomic number, periodicity of the elements, lewis dot structures... All stuff everyone should already know.
But he starts of the lecture saying how the best students are the ones that take a huge amount of notes, like with giant fucking binder where they've written everything down and worked all the problems... Ugh.
Everyone in class copying exactly what he wrote on the slide. At one point he meant to write "lose" and instead wrote "loose"... and everyone around me wrote "loose" in their notes. They're not even hearing the words he's saying; they're just copying down verbatim what he writes. I promise you, the more accurate the notes the less the student actually understands. If you're keeping up with a class, the only notes you should be taking are things like "Review ionic bonds" or "VESPR (wtf?)". Then you go to google and type in the terms you need to check on. You'll find lectures from better professors and scads of explanations. Don't bother with notes, it just wastes paper. Nothing that you write down will be better than what's in the text or on the web. |
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| 你们好！ |
[Aug. 26th, 2008|11:54 am] |
If I've got that right, the translation is roughly Hi Y'all!
Whew. It was a bit of a pain figuring out how to do the chinese input but now 是很好！
Really this is pretty awesome and not nearly so much of a chore to do as I thought. It'll be a great study aid...
Anyway, heh, I'm taking Chinese this semester and it promises to be a challenge. Somewhere around a third of the class seems to be fluent in Cantonese, which I think means that they can read everything but need to learn new pronunciations. That doesn't seem exactly fair to me... it'll be a challenge to keep up I'm sure.
再见！ |
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| Qaballah and molecular orbital theory |
[Jul. 24th, 2008|02:32 pm] |
I was studying chemistry this morning, diagramming some molecular orbitals. If you've not studied chemistry, molecular orbitals build upon the quantum mechanical, wave function, concepts the nature of the electron and apply it over multiple atoms as they come together to form chemical bonds. The wave functions of the individual atoms combine to create interference patterns and new wave patterns, new "orbitals". "Filling" the molecular orbitals in a diagram can tell you the expected bond strength between two atoms...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_orbital_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MO_diagram
Anyway, while drawing it I had a spooky sensation I'd seen this before:
While I hesitate to take this too far, there are some really interesting connections. The vertical positions of the orbitals in these diagrams correspond to the energy levels. Electrons, like everything, settles to the lowest available energy level. The σ (sigma) orbitals are symmetrical about the line joining the two nuclei. The π (pi) orbitals are off to the sides. The orbitals with '*'s are anti-bonding orbitals. The strength of the bond is half the sum of the number of electrons in bonding orbitals - the number in anti-bonding orbitals.
Now, there are only eight orbitals here, but notice how they switch position. Once the second bonding sigma orbital is full, (tipareth is occupied) it drops in energy level and the pi orbitals move up...
Notice that the highest three orbitals are all anti-bonding orbitals. If all these are full, the bond can't exist because the bond strength falls to zero. This corresponds to the upper triad in the tree of life... I could draw out a number of other metaphors, but I'll just leave it at that... isn't that interesting. |
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