Just a poem for your pleasure:
Yellow Jet Fighters
Aerodynamic,
swept-wing design,
slice through the
lower atmosphere
with swooshing speed
Signaled by the equinox
they start their mass-
-fleet mobilizing
Immediate alarms
sounded by wind
scramble ever more squadrons
until the tree is bare
--C. Lassen 10/26/07 on the way to biochemistry class
Friday, October 26, 2007
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Levitate Me
Right now we're waiting in our apartment to be interviewed. Emily was so nervous just waiting, she had to go deliver her flyers for her Layers Party she's throwing next week.
A few months ago, we got a notice about a scholarship that the Anasazi foundation was giving out to persons who've "Walked Forward" since participating in their program. So we talked it over, I wrote up a nomination, and we sent it in. Two weeks ago we found out that Emily was going to be awarded one of the four $1000 scholarships (which will gladly go towards her nursing program). She will be honored at a large fancy banquet dinner in Phoenix early next month and one of the 5 nominated persons will win a $2000 scholarship and the other 4 will receive their $1000 scholarships. They are taping interviews with each nominee and the video will be shown at the dinner. Some representatives from Anasazi are on their way over to tape us right now.
I wish I could make it to the dinner. I will be in Las Vegas the day before for a Dental School interview, and leaving for Philadelphia the day after the dinner. We can't figure out how to justify missing even more school and the money to drive and fly even more. Emily will be flying down for the dinner where her parents will meet her, and then drive to California with them while I'm in Philadelphia. I'm so torn that I can't go.
Emily is even getting to spend a day out on the trail on Wednesday. She asked if she could go back out just for a day, and Anasazi said that'd be no problem. Hopefully, someone will be able to watch Grace that day, and during the dinner. We're going to call some family members in the area and try to arrange this.
I'm so excited for Emily. She deserves this.
(We're just nervous about what to say in front of the camera :-)
A few months ago, we got a notice about a scholarship that the Anasazi foundation was giving out to persons who've "Walked Forward" since participating in their program. So we talked it over, I wrote up a nomination, and we sent it in. Two weeks ago we found out that Emily was going to be awarded one of the four $1000 scholarships (which will gladly go towards her nursing program). She will be honored at a large fancy banquet dinner in Phoenix early next month and one of the 5 nominated persons will win a $2000 scholarship and the other 4 will receive their $1000 scholarships. They are taping interviews with each nominee and the video will be shown at the dinner. Some representatives from Anasazi are on their way over to tape us right now.
I wish I could make it to the dinner. I will be in Las Vegas the day before for a Dental School interview, and leaving for Philadelphia the day after the dinner. We can't figure out how to justify missing even more school and the money to drive and fly even more. Emily will be flying down for the dinner where her parents will meet her, and then drive to California with them while I'm in Philadelphia. I'm so torn that I can't go.
Emily is even getting to spend a day out on the trail on Wednesday. She asked if she could go back out just for a day, and Anasazi said that'd be no problem. Hopefully, someone will be able to watch Grace that day, and during the dinner. We're going to call some family members in the area and try to arrange this.
I'm so excited for Emily. She deserves this.
(We're just nervous about what to say in front of the camera :-)
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Isla De Encanta
It's been over a week since I wrote on this. Hope people are still checking it out. This one is just a bunch of tidbits floating through my mind.
Some goings on: Extra homework assignments, midterms, and stuff going on. I got another interview invitation at University of the Pacific. Way COOL. That's 4 interviews in November. I'm not sure how I'm going to keep up with missing so much school. Still 8 more schools to hear back from. But 5 interviews out of 9 so far is pretty good.
We went paddleboarding the other day. We tried a different spot. We drove out on the service road that circles the Provo Airport till we found a spot where there wasn't any plants and could just throw the board right in the water. Perfectly calm day. Absolutely beautiful. The clouds were boiling on their undersides, the smoke from a nearby fire was staying 20 feet from the ground, and the forecast was for rain the next day, but I went paddleboarding in the calm cloudy evening. The sun breaking through on the far side of the lake over those mountains to the southwest. Some birds out on the lake calling, ducks splashing around in the plants. Just great. The only downside was the CRAZY amounts of mosquitoes right near the shore. Emily and Grace got stormed and chased back into the car. I was racing to get more than 50 feet from shore, while reaching down once in a while to wave away the buffet line hanging around my legs. Yesterday I counted 21 bites on one calf, and another 25 on the other. Good fun. Emily asked if it was worth it. Oh yeah. Totally. I just paddled straight out into the lake about a mile, twice. Sat on the board way out there. Very nice, but still not comparable to the celestial room of any temple. But VERY nice anyways.
The other night we watched Drumline on TV. I wasn't expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised. One of the driving themes of the movie is the debate of technique vs. style. Or crowd-pleasing versus "good". Same theme as Strictly Ballroom. As we watched the movie I thought of about 5-6 other examples of the same debate. In Gladiator (not worth watching) there's a small challenge for the main character, killing quickly vs. killing entertainingly (great, huh? thbthbthb). Emily and I went to a lot of the gymnastic meets this past year and noticed some gymnasts were very entertaining but not very good, while others were very good, but not entertaining.
It's so strange to think of the differences between men and women. Not the physically apparent ones, but the psychological ones. We were watching a TV show with another couple the other night and one character confesses to his wife that he was unfaithful. Our friend, she says what I was thinking, "That would crush me." What struck me as odd is that it would crush her for a very different reason than it would crush me, although both would be founded on the same thing. She is very pregnant right now, and I've gathered at least enough to understand that her husband is a bit frustrated with the lack of affection right now. Me, I would be crushed if my spouse (whose affections I work so hard for) just gave out her intimacy to some schmoe. Either way it would be a breach of covenants and promises and that's what would hurt the most, but just a funny show of the differences between men and women. The other night I told Emily she was looking extremely nice. She responds, "Is that all?" I now what she wanted, she was fishing for more compliments :-D, but I also tried to defend it saying, "That's a lot! I wouldn't tell you you were pretty if you weren't otherwise great." If she were mean, lazy, or otherwise unpleasant and our relationship were in a similar condition, I wouldn't be in the mood to say anything nice about her.
Also funny since Emily, like most women, works SO hard to be pretty. Just don't compliment on it without having some other good cards up your sleeve too. Fling out those cards at just the right moment, "You're so great with Grace." "You keep the house so nice" "Dinner was absolutely delicious." Fwing fwing fwing. She won't know what hit her. Cards and compliments flying everywhere. 52-card pickup for FHE tonight.
If you want GOOD TV, I'd like to make some recommendations: Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon, and Man vs. Wild on Discovery Channel.
Avatar is a great show, a cartoon, with an incredible amount of thought gone into it. Highly entertaining, but imaginative and creative enough to make you think. A great deal of eastern philosophy, religion, martial arts and discipline play a huge role in the show. It's now on it's third and probably final season (It was only meant to cover three different "Books" or seasons). It's lighthearted and funny while being very introspective and mature. You can find the episodes around the internet to watch, but just recently it's been a little more difficult because of some cracking down. You should be able to find all the episodes on Nick.com, but they're all out of order and their system of organization is really strange.
Man vs. Wild is a show with this amazing guy, Bear Grylls, being placed in wilderness situations followed by a camera crew as he shows the audience how to survive in all sorts of environments, drawing on knowledge of native cultures, wilderness experts, and local peoples and rangers. He keeps it interesting and exciting as well as good natured and informative. Bear Grylls is a great role model and an amazing person, both for the things he's done as well as the life he lives. There's been a bit of controversy over the show and how "real" it is. I think a lot of it is from people who pulled the wool over their own eyes to think he'd really be putting himself in danger for a TV show. He only said he did what he was shown to be doing (which, most of it, is quite impressive anyways). The techniques are all viable for the situations. I'm sure the editors and producers at Discovery tried to make it a little more exciting by keeping back some details, but they're out now, and they've reedited most of the previous episodes to better express the nature of the events. The whole show was meant to be informative more than anything, but it seems a lot of people watched it, waiting for the guy to kill himself (which is a large reason stunt shows and extreme sports are fun to watch, there's always the "what if something happens" that makes it exciting). Then, when viewers find out that he's not as seriously in danger as they led themselves to believe, they feel betrayed.
It is a great show and a lot of fun to see the survival techniques and locations as well as gain a knowledge about plants and animals.
Some goings on: Extra homework assignments, midterms, and stuff going on. I got another interview invitation at University of the Pacific. Way COOL. That's 4 interviews in November. I'm not sure how I'm going to keep up with missing so much school. Still 8 more schools to hear back from. But 5 interviews out of 9 so far is pretty good.
We went paddleboarding the other day. We tried a different spot. We drove out on the service road that circles the Provo Airport till we found a spot where there wasn't any plants and could just throw the board right in the water. Perfectly calm day. Absolutely beautiful. The clouds were boiling on their undersides, the smoke from a nearby fire was staying 20 feet from the ground, and the forecast was for rain the next day, but I went paddleboarding in the calm cloudy evening. The sun breaking through on the far side of the lake over those mountains to the southwest. Some birds out on the lake calling, ducks splashing around in the plants. Just great. The only downside was the CRAZY amounts of mosquitoes right near the shore. Emily and Grace got stormed and chased back into the car. I was racing to get more than 50 feet from shore, while reaching down once in a while to wave away the buffet line hanging around my legs. Yesterday I counted 21 bites on one calf, and another 25 on the other. Good fun. Emily asked if it was worth it. Oh yeah. Totally. I just paddled straight out into the lake about a mile, twice. Sat on the board way out there. Very nice, but still not comparable to the celestial room of any temple. But VERY nice anyways.
The other night we watched Drumline on TV. I wasn't expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised. One of the driving themes of the movie is the debate of technique vs. style. Or crowd-pleasing versus "good". Same theme as Strictly Ballroom. As we watched the movie I thought of about 5-6 other examples of the same debate. In Gladiator (not worth watching) there's a small challenge for the main character, killing quickly vs. killing entertainingly (great, huh? thbthbthb). Emily and I went to a lot of the gymnastic meets this past year and noticed some gymnasts were very entertaining but not very good, while others were very good, but not entertaining.
It's so strange to think of the differences between men and women. Not the physically apparent ones, but the psychological ones. We were watching a TV show with another couple the other night and one character confesses to his wife that he was unfaithful. Our friend, she says what I was thinking, "That would crush me." What struck me as odd is that it would crush her for a very different reason than it would crush me, although both would be founded on the same thing. She is very pregnant right now, and I've gathered at least enough to understand that her husband is a bit frustrated with the lack of affection right now. Me, I would be crushed if my spouse (whose affections I work so hard for) just gave out her intimacy to some schmoe. Either way it would be a breach of covenants and promises and that's what would hurt the most, but just a funny show of the differences between men and women. The other night I told Emily she was looking extremely nice. She responds, "Is that all?" I now what she wanted, she was fishing for more compliments :-D, but I also tried to defend it saying, "That's a lot! I wouldn't tell you you were pretty if you weren't otherwise great." If she were mean, lazy, or otherwise unpleasant and our relationship were in a similar condition, I wouldn't be in the mood to say anything nice about her.
Also funny since Emily, like most women, works SO hard to be pretty. Just don't compliment on it without having some other good cards up your sleeve too. Fling out those cards at just the right moment, "You're so great with Grace." "You keep the house so nice" "Dinner was absolutely delicious." Fwing fwing fwing. She won't know what hit her. Cards and compliments flying everywhere. 52-card pickup for FHE tonight.
If you want GOOD TV, I'd like to make some recommendations: Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon, and Man vs. Wild on Discovery Channel.
Avatar is a great show, a cartoon, with an incredible amount of thought gone into it. Highly entertaining, but imaginative and creative enough to make you think. A great deal of eastern philosophy, religion, martial arts and discipline play a huge role in the show. It's now on it's third and probably final season (It was only meant to cover three different "Books" or seasons). It's lighthearted and funny while being very introspective and mature. You can find the episodes around the internet to watch, but just recently it's been a little more difficult because of some cracking down. You should be able to find all the episodes on Nick.com, but they're all out of order and their system of organization is really strange.
Man vs. Wild is a show with this amazing guy, Bear Grylls, being placed in wilderness situations followed by a camera crew as he shows the audience how to survive in all sorts of environments, drawing on knowledge of native cultures, wilderness experts, and local peoples and rangers. He keeps it interesting and exciting as well as good natured and informative. Bear Grylls is a great role model and an amazing person, both for the things he's done as well as the life he lives. There's been a bit of controversy over the show and how "real" it is. I think a lot of it is from people who pulled the wool over their own eyes to think he'd really be putting himself in danger for a TV show. He only said he did what he was shown to be doing (which, most of it, is quite impressive anyways). The techniques are all viable for the situations. I'm sure the editors and producers at Discovery tried to make it a little more exciting by keeping back some details, but they're out now, and they've reedited most of the previous episodes to better express the nature of the events. The whole show was meant to be informative more than anything, but it seems a lot of people watched it, waiting for the guy to kill himself (which is a large reason stunt shows and extreme sports are fun to watch, there's always the "what if something happens" that makes it exciting). Then, when viewers find out that he's not as seriously in danger as they led themselves to believe, they feel betrayed.
It is a great show and a lot of fun to see the survival techniques and locations as well as gain a knowledge about plants and animals.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
I'm Amazed
The internet can get people to do some wonderfully unselfish things.
Most people are familiar with Windows and Mac OS. These are operating systems that let you use your computer. Inside your computer boxes, you've got this fancy hunk of metal and plastic and silicon, but there would be no way to practically use it or get it to do anything without some method of interacting with it. Windows and Mac OS are programs written to your hard drive that relay instructions between the person and the lifeless computer.
There are many other operating systems out there doing all sorts of things. UNIX is one of the oldest, but not user friendly and not owned by any one company, it's free. It's so not-user-friendly, that you'd need advanced degrees or some serious programming skills to do anything with it. There's no pictures, no point-click. Text based, and not even intuitively text-based. (MS-Dos is the text-based backbone to Windows, and was so popular and easy to use, it did really really well, hence the start of Microsoft). UNIX has stuck around because for those who can get it to work, it works very well and can do just about anything, and never crashes or messes up.
Since no one owns it, no one wants to invest tons of money to develop and advance UNIX, since they wouldn't be able to have exclusive rights to it, they'd have to share it. Thus UNIX is at the mercy of whomever wants to tinker with it. Enter: Linus Torvalds, a Finnish college student. He created a tweaked version of unix and called it Linux, and kept it free to be used under the general use agreement. Linux has become popular among programmers and computer super-users, because of it's power, stability, free use, and better usability.
A few companies developed nice "front-ends" or usable interfaces which they sold, like Red Hat Linux, or Novell's Suse Linux. As linux spread, anybody and everybody that knows what they're doing has tweaked or changed, or added something. A few graphical interfaces (point and click with pictures and images) were created (Gnome and KDE). There are more different versions and "builds" of linux than anyone knows right now. The two most active areas are very very small builds that can run decently fast from a CD or disk (without the need for a hard drive or storage) and large personal computer versions with all sorts of open-source, free software included. One of the larger versions that's gaining a lot of popularity is Ubuntu. It was started and is sponsored by a South African philanthropist aimed at having an affordable (free) operating system available to anyone. This idea is big for developing countries where money is short and computers are old or not as powerful. (There's even a big mess of tweaked versions of Ubuntu, for various situations)
The collection of software available is extensive and still growing, but since most of it is created by hobbyists, they're not perfect or complete, and any bugs or problems only get fixed as the need or interest arises. GIMP is a popular photo/image editing program that's getting to be on par with Photoshop. OpenOffice is a full office suite. We use it here at home on a Windows machine. It's only okay, but it does everything we need it to do, and its FREE.
I've used just a few different linux "distributions" (distros for short) and I enjoy using it. But my frustration is the same reason it is still held back from becoming the universal system for computers. The driver support is minimal. Drivers are computer files that give the specifics for all the little pieces of your computer to the operating system. Your CD-Drive, wireless card, mouse, keyboard, etc all have a driver built into the operating system. Each manufacturer has their own, almost every different model of equipment has it's own. And since no one is getting paid to create drivers for Linux, almost no one does. (If you're good enough to get your custom Linux machine able to print or go wireless, you're onto something most are missing)
So Linux has limped at quite a decent pace for the past several years. Not too long ago, Dell even started selling computers with Ubuntu pre-installed on them. It's an amazing thing that is has progressed so well being done mostly off of the work of hobbyists and geeks with free-time, with a good deal of help from larger companies and non-profit groups.
So here's an amazing thing: this guy Greg Kroah-Hartman, decides to extend an offer to any company to develop drivers for FREE. He's received such an overwhelming response that the project has breathed a life of its own. Countless offers from individuals and groups willing to help, and countless offers from manufacturers and companies to take him up on it. Even his employer, Novell, is encouraging he spend full-time on this. I'm sure some people have a financial interest in it, but for the most part, it's just to make things better for everyone.
Most people are familiar with Windows and Mac OS. These are operating systems that let you use your computer. Inside your computer boxes, you've got this fancy hunk of metal and plastic and silicon, but there would be no way to practically use it or get it to do anything without some method of interacting with it. Windows and Mac OS are programs written to your hard drive that relay instructions between the person and the lifeless computer.
There are many other operating systems out there doing all sorts of things. UNIX is one of the oldest, but not user friendly and not owned by any one company, it's free. It's so not-user-friendly, that you'd need advanced degrees or some serious programming skills to do anything with it. There's no pictures, no point-click. Text based, and not even intuitively text-based. (MS-Dos is the text-based backbone to Windows, and was so popular and easy to use, it did really really well, hence the start of Microsoft). UNIX has stuck around because for those who can get it to work, it works very well and can do just about anything, and never crashes or messes up.
Since no one owns it, no one wants to invest tons of money to develop and advance UNIX, since they wouldn't be able to have exclusive rights to it, they'd have to share it. Thus UNIX is at the mercy of whomever wants to tinker with it. Enter: Linus Torvalds, a Finnish college student. He created a tweaked version of unix and called it Linux, and kept it free to be used under the general use agreement. Linux has become popular among programmers and computer super-users, because of it's power, stability, free use, and better usability.
A few companies developed nice "front-ends" or usable interfaces which they sold, like Red Hat Linux, or Novell's Suse Linux. As linux spread, anybody and everybody that knows what they're doing has tweaked or changed, or added something. A few graphical interfaces (point and click with pictures and images) were created (Gnome and KDE). There are more different versions and "builds" of linux than anyone knows right now. The two most active areas are very very small builds that can run decently fast from a CD or disk (without the need for a hard drive or storage) and large personal computer versions with all sorts of open-source, free software included. One of the larger versions that's gaining a lot of popularity is Ubuntu. It was started and is sponsored by a South African philanthropist aimed at having an affordable (free) operating system available to anyone. This idea is big for developing countries where money is short and computers are old or not as powerful. (There's even a big mess of tweaked versions of Ubuntu, for various situations)
The collection of software available is extensive and still growing, but since most of it is created by hobbyists, they're not perfect or complete, and any bugs or problems only get fixed as the need or interest arises. GIMP is a popular photo/image editing program that's getting to be on par with Photoshop. OpenOffice is a full office suite. We use it here at home on a Windows machine. It's only okay, but it does everything we need it to do, and its FREE.
I've used just a few different linux "distributions" (distros for short) and I enjoy using it. But my frustration is the same reason it is still held back from becoming the universal system for computers. The driver support is minimal. Drivers are computer files that give the specifics for all the little pieces of your computer to the operating system. Your CD-Drive, wireless card, mouse, keyboard, etc all have a driver built into the operating system. Each manufacturer has their own, almost every different model of equipment has it's own. And since no one is getting paid to create drivers for Linux, almost no one does. (If you're good enough to get your custom Linux machine able to print or go wireless, you're onto something most are missing)
So Linux has limped at quite a decent pace for the past several years. Not too long ago, Dell even started selling computers with Ubuntu pre-installed on them. It's an amazing thing that is has progressed so well being done mostly off of the work of hobbyists and geeks with free-time, with a good deal of help from larger companies and non-profit groups.
So here's an amazing thing: this guy Greg Kroah-Hartman, decides to extend an offer to any company to develop drivers for FREE. He's received such an overwhelming response that the project has breathed a life of its own. Countless offers from individuals and groups willing to help, and countless offers from manufacturers and companies to take him up on it. Even his employer, Novell, is encouraging he spend full-time on this. I'm sure some people have a financial interest in it, but for the most part, it's just to make things better for everyone.
Blown Away
Here's a cool bit of science and stuff:
There's these little guys known as Pistol Shrimp. They live at the bottom of the ocean and have giant forearm and little claw (not like Fiddler Crabs with big forearm and BIG claw). If you have a minute, check out this video here. The cool part is the other shrimp that gets launched away by the snap of the Pistol Shrimp.
In case you can't see the video, the pistol shrimp cocks his pincher open, waits, then SNAPS it shut so fast and so loud it BANGS and sends a shockwave that stuns or can even kill small fish and other shrimp (which then become food for the Pistol Shrimp). In slow motion and with special cameras you can see a bubble form, collapse, and even light up for just a bit. This is called a cavitation bubble. The claw moves so frikkin' fast that as the water clings to the backside of the claw, the water literally tears apart, creating a tiny vacuum void in the water. Water vaporizes at low pressures (like how water boils at lower temperatures at higher altitudes, there's less air pushing on the surface of the water) so a bit of water vapor fills the void/bubble. BUT, as the pressure around the water collapses the bubble again, the water vapor has to be forced back into liquid. This creates the crazy amount of energy given off as sound, light, and heat (around the temperature of the surface of the sun!!!) The light given off known as sonoluminescence and can be induced with ultrasonic sound waves as well.
These cavitation bubbles are not uncommon, but Pistol Shrimp are the first organisms discovered who use them. Cavitation can blow holes into boat propellors and pumps. Ultra-sonic baths work on the same principle to clean instruments and jewelry (the ultra-sonic scalers in some dental offices are often called cavitrons).
There's these little guys known as Pistol Shrimp. They live at the bottom of the ocean and have giant forearm and little claw (not like Fiddler Crabs with big forearm and BIG claw). If you have a minute, check out this video here. The cool part is the other shrimp that gets launched away by the snap of the Pistol Shrimp.
In case you can't see the video, the pistol shrimp cocks his pincher open, waits, then SNAPS it shut so fast and so loud it BANGS and sends a shockwave that stuns or can even kill small fish and other shrimp (which then become food for the Pistol Shrimp). In slow motion and with special cameras you can see a bubble form, collapse, and even light up for just a bit. This is called a cavitation bubble. The claw moves so frikkin' fast that as the water clings to the backside of the claw, the water literally tears apart, creating a tiny vacuum void in the water. Water vaporizes at low pressures (like how water boils at lower temperatures at higher altitudes, there's less air pushing on the surface of the water) so a bit of water vapor fills the void/bubble. BUT, as the pressure around the water collapses the bubble again, the water vapor has to be forced back into liquid. This creates the crazy amount of energy given off as sound, light, and heat (around the temperature of the surface of the sun!!!) The light given off known as sonoluminescence and can be induced with ultrasonic sound waves as well.
These cavitation bubbles are not uncommon, but Pistol Shrimp are the first organisms discovered who use them. Cavitation can blow holes into boat propellors and pumps. Ultra-sonic baths work on the same principle to clean instruments and jewelry (the ultra-sonic scalers in some dental offices are often called cavitrons).
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