Category: General

• The transit of Venus was this morning. I got up to go to Hopkins to see it, saw the cloud cover, and went back to bed. Only an hour was visible in MN anyhow. Thanks to the internet, lots of live webcasts were available from around the world.
• Tampa won the Stanley Cup. This is wrong. There should be no NHL teams in cities where it doesn’t snow. Phoenix, LA, Tampa, San Jose, etc. should all get the boot.
• I like physics, but the labs are pretty stupid. When they say things fall at a certain rate, I’ll take their word for it. I took some exams from the MIT Open Course site and did well on them.
• I’m starting biology and differential equations/linear algebra in a week. I’m taking the math class pass/fail because I already have credit for it because I took them at Macalester.

Here is another thing I found which is interesting. In 1947, Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, testified before the House Un-American Affairs Committee. This was before (Appleton, WI native) Joseph McCarthy was elected to the Senate.

Here is his testimony.

Here’s a fun fact for you. I was born on August 24, 1969. If I had a gestation period of exactly nine months, that means I was conceived on December 24, 1968….Christmas Eve. 12/24/68 wasn’t just Christmas Eve however, it was a pretty memorable day for humanity, which I think can explain my current path through academia.

That fun fact aside, with the passing of Reagan, it made me realize how many of the current crop of kids in high school are about as familiar with him as I was with LBJ. Love him or hate him, Reagan was president from the time I was 11 till my freshman year in college. I can still remember watching all the election results for both elections, watching the conventions (yeah, I did that stuff even at that age), him, John Lennon and the Pope all getting shot (I didn’t know who John Lennon was at the time. I knew who the Beatles were, but not that he was in the group. My mom had to tell me.) I was between classes my junior year in high school when the space shuttle blew up.

I had about $600 in a savings account that my parents had kept for me from when I was born. I spent the whole thing on an Apple IIc in high school. Not a bad investment actually. I had no modem, and only later did I even get a printer. No hard drive, one floppy drive (the 5.25″ ones), and a tiny monochrome green screen.

My parents and their siblings were borne right after WWII. They didn’t experience the depression or the war. The thing they remember is Kennedy being shot and man landing on the moon. My grandparents had the stories of the depression and the war. My great-grandfather, who died when I was 14, served in WWI, having been sent to France. I’m sure his parents were all worked up over the gold standard.

My dad purchased a calculator sometime in the 1970s. The display had red LCD’s. He still has it in fact. I had a solar power calculator that I got in high school that did basic arithmetic and some trig functions. I still have it. Kids today all have graphing calculators.

This isn’t some lament for the past. Just an acknowledgment that some events and things during your formative years serve as reference points for you, and if your younger or older, your going to have different reference points. Reagan was a reference point, as I’m sure Clinton or Bush is to the ones who came after, in a way they just aren’t to people who are older.

You will notice a section to the right that lists a few books. Its a tool from AllConsuming.net that lets you track books your reading online. The problem is, the tool is pretty crappy and I really don’t like the layout. Xanga has a nice built in feature, but I have no desire to abandon my domain name and start another cookie cutter blog. If anyone has some suggestions for a better tool, I’d love to hear it.

I have a huge backlog of reading I have to do. One book I’ve been wanting to read for a long time, and have finally gotten around to buying it, is The Deep Hot Earth, by Thomas Gold. His thesis (actually, it was first thought of in Russia) is pretty simple: fossil fuels are in fact not fuel made from fossils. Petroleum has been around since the creation of the earth and its why we haven’t run out of it. Oil field get replenished from reserves further below.

I’ll reserve judgement till I’ve read more about it, but its an intutively appealing idea that explains a lot of things: why haven’t we run out of oil?, why do we find helium in petrolium?, why did they find oil when they drilled in solid granite in Sweeden? More than just the abiogenic theory of petroleum creation, he also believes that there is a lot of life below the surface of the earth. He estimates that the total mass of microbial life below the surface is greater than that above it. The life that lives deep in the cracks of the earth use organic compounds (like oil) as food and may be where life on earth originated.

Also, I think I need to write a new Barry Bonds update soon. I also have to write up a thing on ethnomathematics that my friend Sean sent me.

I’ve been pestered to update the site more, so here is an update.

It doesn’t seem like the gaps between posts are that long to me because I write so many that never make the cut.

I’ve started my summer physics class. So far, so good. It seems pretty easy and I’m not too worried about it. I purchased a graphing calculator, my first one ever. There are a ton of functions on it and its going to take me a while to learn it properly. I really like how you can write out an equation before you have it crunch the numbers. A big improvement over my previous calculator (which is like 17 years old). I’ve solidified my opinions more on the subject of using a calculator in school. I never really used one, beyond simple arithmetic up till now. The only reason why I’m using one now is because plugging in numbers into the quadradic equation all the time to get a solution is a pain in the ass. Also, I have enough of a conceptual understanding of the math behind the physics, that it really does become just a time saver. ALL of the Apple Valley kids have graphing calculators and in fact, their textbooks seem structured around it. That’s sad. Everyone should be able to visualize certain fuctions in their head: sine, cosine, e^x, 1/x, tan, the unit circle.

I have a biology class that starts in 2 weeks, and I’m not too worried about that class either. I’m still debating if I should take the differential equations class. I took it at Macalester, but it was a while ago and I could use the refresher. If I do, I think I’ll take it pass/fail.

CFL in Boston was last week. The team overall did well, with Jeff Long making it to semifinals
and Tim “you mean nothing to me now that your extemp career is over” Hogan dropped for the third year in a row in Quarterfinals. Apple Valley placed in the top 5 in speech sweepstakes and over all team sweepstakes.

I’ve been reading a lot lately on the subject of astrobiology. Its a fancy sounding word and a pretty new discipline, and its very inter-disciplinary. Its where astrophysics/paelobiology/geophyiscs/biochemestery all meet up. Physicists have a good idea of how the universe was created up to the first 10^-23 seconds after the big bang. Paleontologists have a pretty good grasp of evolution going back a few billion years. However, there is the period shortly after the formation of the Earth where, somehow, life sprang up out of nothing. The billion dollar question is how exactly did it happen and how easily can it be replicated outside of the Earth.

Anyways, its fun stuff.