from the desk of stinkpot

just finished installing palm’s software that lets my antique sony clie play nice with my mac.

only took 2 hours of my time and the incidental deletion of my desktop and all of its files and folders.  i can’t recall exactly what was there, but i’m sure it was important; why else would it be on my desktop then?  an adviser of mine loved to say: “a clean desk is symptomatic of a sick mind.”

ugh, computers – even macs – can be such a pain.

purgatory is a real place: it takes about 24 hours to pass through and requires “de-planing” 3 times, checking/collecting luggage twice, and a 15-hour confinement period next to a sweet, but aromatically-challenged old man.

(does the biting cold outside of the arrival terminal mean i didn’t go to hell?)

so much catching up to do!  but first things first: my webserver is back online, after a bone-headed security update i performed broke my dynamic dns settings.

many pictures to be posted in coming days!

back in manila after spending the weekend on bohol, a small island just north of the equator.  will describe in greater detail when i get home and upload photos.

————

will keep posts short and sweet; internet here is like molasses.  (but that shouldn’t belie how wired this country is – people here are constantly texting each other; i don’t know anyone in the states who texts as much as the average filipino.)

————

i’m doing ok.  not too jetlagged because i pulled an all-nighter the day before i left, while trying to put my affairs in order.  although my epidermal layer is a bit upset: i’m terribly sunburned and mosquito bitten already.  and, i’ve got this infection under a big toe-nail from when i jammed a toe while climbing a waterfall.  fair trade i’d say, given how beautiful that waterfall was.

————

my family’s house in manila is so interesting.  it’s filled with old photos that i’m having a great time leafing through.  and, the house itself looks like a photograph that’s been left in the sun for 50 years – the post-WW2 architecture of brightly painted concrete and darkly lacquered mahogany is faded, weathered, and dusty.  still, there are about 9 people living here right now, giving the place plenty of life. 

————

although, it should be noted that 3 of those people are maids.  this place is like a plantation – there are people cleaning up after me, doing the errand running, driving the cars, and cooking the food.  back in the states, a lot is made about how the distribution of wealth has a big tail to the right: the top 1% of the population is much richer than everyone else.  here in the philippines, that long-tail also exists, but the distribution also has a giant hump all the way to the left: the bottom 30-50% of the population is profoundly poor.  so poor that the middle class is provided with an ample servant workforce.  our family’s tobacco crop out back is doing splendidly.

————

i’m glad i came to see my grandparents.  i was shocked to see how infirmed and feeble they now appear.  especially my grandfather; i just came across his medal from the 1958 pan-asian games.  he won the gold in judo, besting fighters from traditional powerhouses japan and korea.  and, i saw pictures from when he coached the filipino team during the munich olympics.  he looked so strong; today, standing up is a formidible physical test for him. 

————

time for breakfast.  over and out.

quick-hitting post, since my flight leaves in 5 hours and i’ve yet to pack a single article of clothing.

classes:  wonderful, unfortunately.  had hoped by now i’d be sick of school, which would expedite process of entering real world + earning real paycheck.  instead, i love my class on inference & information: i miss seeing math that isn’t some ODE describing protein synthesis rates.  instead, i see real math: probability.  in only 3 classes, i’ve already learned how to derive computational tools i’ve taken for granted for years, such as the likelihood ratio test and the ROC curve.  yes, i was turned on by the end of last lecture.   my other class, chris marx’s microbial evolution class over at the big H, i’ll celebrate similarly.   in only 2 weeks of lecture, i feel like my understanding of evolution has grown exponentially.  i’m much less embarrassed now to say i’m getting a phd in biology stuff.

biking: freezing rain, sleet, and hail all enjoyed a menage-a-trois on my pants and socks today as i biked to and from harvard.   as much as it sucked, will make the following 3 weeks all the sweeter [see below].

valentine’s day: nothing says romance like the movie christina picked out for renting this evening.  “centipede!“  think romeo + juliet, where romeo = awesomely bad screenplay and juliet = 20-foot rubber centipede in a south-asian cave.

tomorrow: hopping on plane to philippines to wish my grandfather a happy 90th birthday.  am elated for so many reasons: seeing side of family for first time in 8 years; getting to visit remote island away from cities; tagalog has no words for sleet, freezing rain, or hail.  if anyone wants me to bring home filipino non-perishables, let me know.  i’ve already got some people down for filipino broccoli [dog-meat jerky].

a fascinating read this morning on students who receive phds in the natural sciences from secular institutions – and continue to insist earth’s origins were biblical in nature.

i find it remarkable that anyone can sufficiently digest geoscience literature to write a decent doctoral thesis – and still remain unconvinced enough to buy into a “young earth.”

then again, i guess you can step into any religious studies department and find dozens of academics who can recite and intelligently ruminate on any number of religious texts from belief systems they don’t adhere to.   for instance, a good friend here in cambridge is jewish – and wants to devote her phd thesis to the study of catholic saints in north america.  clearly she doesn’t derive spiritual benefit from this work; she does, however, recognize hagiography as one useful method for understanding how religion, culture, and society intertwine.

so maybe i’d argue that it’s entirely reasonable for a young-earth youngster to study “conventional” geology.  if anything, this only validates said geology – even creationists see some value to its study.

what i’d love to see is some evangelicals make a similar case for the value of biblical geoscience.  all they’d need is some non-fundamentalist christians getting their phds in young-earth studies.   funny how rare those birds seem to be.

so as i sit here in bed, wrapping up my blog post and getting ready to sleep, christina [asleep] rolls over and says with her eyes closed, “you are right my friend.”

hurm.

i’ve just gently elbowed her.

“who were you talking to chris?”

“i was dreaming about how you can get different kinds of sleep.”

within seconds, she’s back to sleep.

like profoundly disoriented snowbirds, christina and i decided to escape boston in the dead of winter last weekend – by heading north to montreal.  jesse and hillary accompanied us, eager to return to the city they both attended university in.

good lord it was cold.  -20 centigrade at least (or most, depending on what’s up when you go negative).  oddly enough, it didn’t feel much colder than boston.  my theory is that after a certain minimal threshold, my body’s internal thermometer hits its limit and can no longer differentiate between gradations of cold; instead, a primal survival apparatus just reports: “you’re going to die soon – seek a woolly mammoth carcass to climb into.”   occassionally, it’ll also deliver the postscript message: “natural selection spent several thousand years getting your body in shape to live on a tropical paradise.  get the f*** out of the northeast.”

in spite of the weather, we did get to see and do lots of things.  we tried poutine, canada’s national snack food.  it was heavenly: french fries drenched in gravy, floating atop an inland sea of cool cheese curds on your plate.  i assume it was invented by canadian cardiologists so as to put their kids through college, or by god, because she finds temptation hilarious.

[above photo is a great example of me shooting with too small an aperture; see how only part of the fries are in focus.  shooting digital and still got so many bad habits.]

as usual, i did a lot of walking around and taking pictures:

we also went to “la fete des neiges” or the festival of snow, if my french serves me at all.  in one of the city parks, a makeshift snow theme-park was constructed, replete with tube slides and outdoor heaters for people lacking the polar bear gene.

i also came across the best cassette tape cover ever, in montreal’s south-asian neighborhood.  what in the hell was his music label’s marketing department thinking?  he looks like he’s trying out for the part of the mildly retarded character in office space.

finally, nature felt a little bad for what she put us through during the weekend, so she blessed us with a beautiful sunset during our ride home through vermont:

golly i like that photo.

more photos from montreal live here.

i’m starting to adopt christina’s sleep schedule.  it’s comprised of: passing out on the couch while watching national geographic documentaries about giant crocodiles around midnight and waking up at 7.00 am to go to work.

since no self-respecting programmer would show up to work at 7.30 am, i’ve decided to just have breakfast at home, waste time on my blog, and do some “computer errands,” which mostly consist of performing my monthly server/laptop backup.

i’m quite happy i’ve settled into a backing up groove.  for some reason, i find it really easy to collect stuff: mp3′s, photos, goat Pr0n, etc.  i hear it’s a guy thing, but my mother has a stunning penchant for saving old mattresses, fading christmas decorations, and children’s toys.  before this post devolves into a nature vs. nurture discourse, i think it’s safe to say that people universally share a certain disregard for what to do after something’s been collected and stuffed in the attic.  how many adults are supposed to be targeted by those creepy “mom-and-dad-do-you-have-your-will-in-order” commercials?

well, when i lost my keys a month or two ago, i was forced to finally appreciate the mortality of my data.  a frightening scenario: a stranger with a heart as mottled as dick cheney’s finds my keychain, follows my “lost keys” signs back to my apartment, and proceeds to steal everything: my server, laptop, and even our defenseless gerbils.  because dick cheney is evil enough to steal adorable pets.  100′s of man-hours devoted to building my website and thousands of irreplaceable digital photos pull a houdini, kind of like dick cheney on draft day.  (hehe, ok, no more poking fun at the penguin.)

determined to head disaster off at the digital pass, i began to consider my options.  i realized that burglars might torture me to find where i hid my backups. since i’ve only got a year of interrogation training, i’d probably crack; i decided it’d be best to store the backups off-site.  (would also be useful in the case of something much less sexy, i.e. apartment fire.)

i came across a bunch of online data repositories, all of which charged a virtually nominal fee (if they charged one at all) to hold my data.  i could even setup an old computer in my lab, and have that constantly mirror my home server’s hard drive.  the only catch: i’d have to upload the data over my home dsl’s pathetically wimpy connection.  i’ll note the speed here – 768 Kbs – so that i can have a good laugh when i re-read this blog in a couple of years.  at that rate, backing up my music collection would take about 10 days.  unacceptable, if only for the energy-wastefulness of leaving a computer on for 10 days, solely to do a backup.

i finally figured out, what in retrospect, was a really simple solution.  i went out on black friday and bought a portable hard drive.  (well, to be more precise, andrew procured the hard drive in the face of hordes of screaming circuit city shoppers.)  now, once a month, i toss the drive in my backpack, plug it into my laptop and run a little shell script that dumps everything from my home server onto the hard drive.  i bring the hard drive back to work the next day.

i just back-of-the-enveloped the data transfer rate for this system and it’s pretty respectable.  for 2 gigabytes of data, it takes 10 minutes to download from my server to the portable hard drive (over 54 Mb wireless).  it takes another 10 minutes for me to bike to school.   that works out to a transfer rate of: 100 MB/min = 1.66 MB/sec = 13.33 Mbs, which is about 2-5X faster than most consumer fiber optic connections and 17X faster than DSL.  weeeeeee!

i’ve been working like a dog on ritalin lately: hours upon hours of programming, non-stop.

actual quote from my advisor today: “you know, all these projects you keep taking on – i’m amazed you get them done about as quickly as i assign them to you.”  i give him the “it’s because i’m so smart/talented” grin, since it’s much more macho and much less pathetic than admitting, “it’s because i eat about 2.25 of my 3.00 meals a day here in the lab and have seriously considered laying an air mattress under my desk.”  (although having just written that down, i will admit that also felt macho in a perverse and disturbing way.)

luckily, my labmate + neighbor jesse (who thanks to my work + harvard’s night pre-med classes, i see more than my live-in girlfriend), talked the two of us to going to a pub quiz on wednesday night.  the three of us aren’t exactly trivia giants: we’re more like little speed-bumps that usually get rolled over by more knowledgeable (read: uglier) quiz buffs whenever we play.  nevertheless, i’d been thinking a lot lately about trying to balance work + play in grad school  – it’s occurred to me that i probably don’t want to remember this time of my life for all of the really great experiments i ran; it’ll be a lot more fun to tell my kids about the time i got so drunk in grad school that i tried to joust a moving car while on my bike in a mcdonald’s parking lot … <– true story.  then of course, i am trying to setup a career in science now, so i really ought to publish …

luckily, i was slightly less indecisive that night and decided to stop and smell the roses; we went to the quiz night.  lo and behold, we actually placed second!  had we not confused buck rogers, the space cowboy, and roy rogers, the fried chicken cowboy, we’d have scored $50 smackaroos.  our first loser prize instead: tickets to a burlesque show, hosted by “boink” magazine.  classy.

[life lesson learned: take a break from work == get rewarded with boobs.]

christina and i attended the show tonight, which was surprisingly tame.  the girls didn’t even have tassels on their nipple stickers!  i’d have even been contented with little american flags.  no bother though – the mc: a 6’4″ hulking transvestite who kept screaming “applaud her – applaud now!” like an oversexed and over-pierced tourette’s patient more than satisfied my craving for indecency.  especially when she dragged a frat boy on stage, who proceeded to collapse prostrate; she dry-humped the hell out of his ass.  when the drag queen paused to adjust her cleavage, the frat boy used all of his ninja skills to slide off the stage, thereby setting up the highlight of the evening: the world’s nastiest magician pulled the kid’s cell phone and wallet out of her industrial-strength mini-mini-skirt.

[heh, when i promise less tawdry postings, fate hands me free tickets to a burlesque show.  maybe i should avow writing only more impoverished posts, or only stories about how i'm not the eastern seaboard's most accurate super-soaker-shooter.]

energy-driven geopolitics; ruling family dynasties of questionable conscience; people running around blowing things up in the desert – our world reads like a frank herbert novel.

given the blurring of reality and fiction, can’t our leaders try to be a little more inspirational?  is this the best they can do?  god, what i wouldn’t give to see someone think outside the box a little more.  how about a “no urban planner left behind” act, that would train a generation of thoughtful, eco-conscious city planners who could reduce the amount of driving folks need to do.  or a “war on poor public transportation” – fox news could even lead the propaganda charge aimed at relieving the stigma associated with riding a municipal bus.  perhaps new tax credits to subsidize new bicycle purchases?

it just boggles the mind.  over the past 4 years, we’ve spent billions (maybe even trillions) stabilizing energy-rich regions of the world [while ignoring the imploding energy-poor ones] and witnessed virtually damning evidence of global climate change.  and yet, in those past four years, our oil imports have increased 20%.

can the people in charge really believe that drastic efforts to cut energy consumption, such as gasoline taxes or immediate increases in minimum fuel economy are not beneficial in the long term?  i’m willing to believe arguments that such efforts would at least results in short-term economic harm, events which of course carry with them dire short-term political consequences.

is our system of government configured correctly to enable our leaders to make painful, but necessary long-term decisions?   philosopher-king anyone?  (+1 again for columbia’s liberal arts education!)

[we can also try conscripting anyone who watches the 700 club into an energy prayer unit, tasked with asking god for a renewable energy miracle.  i think she's dropping hints that we may not need to beg too much.  <-- if you're around mit, do yourself a favor and listen to jefferson tester, the lead scientist in the experiment, speak in a lecture or a class one day.  he's likely to derive an amazing statistic: assuming perfect heat energy --> mechanical conversion, one cubic kilometer of granite a mile below the earth's surface possesses enough heat to power the entire country for a year.  (some of those values might be off by an order of magnitude here or there, but you get the idea - earth's crust == lots of energy.)]