BZ's Thoughts

DART needs to be sued

2009-08-06T20:00:00.004-05:00

http://www.kcci.com/news/20298174/detail.html

It is difficult to believe that this type of thing still happens in this day and age. How can people get offended at the message of this ad? "Don't believe in God? You're not alone." I can understand why some people would believe the people who put up the ad were mistaken about the existence of God. But why would people get offended at the message that some people are atheists, or that the specific group of atheists that sponsored this ad are telling other people of like mind that they can join their group? Evidently in large enough numbers complained to get the ad pulled. Even better is this:

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2009/08/06/gov-culver-atheist-bus-ad-is-offensive/

The Governor of the state weighs in to say he is offended by the ad. In a country where freedom of religion is a core value, a governor using his position to say he is offended is extremely distasteful, although not illegal.

http://www.supplychaindigital.com/Des-Moines-Area-Regional-Transit-Authority--Forward-Motion-_26525.aspx

The important line of that article is "DART’s $22 million annual operating budget is funded by a blend of federal and state government funds, fares, transit advertising revenue and local property tax." As it receives government funding, their discrimination is illegal unless they do not allow ads by religious groups. I would find the latter to be highly unlikely.

I got a job!

2009-04-15T20:36:00.003-05:00

Or, at least a job that doesn't involve teaching. I am a research assistant now, and will be writing code for a project at Fermilab that will involve smashing protons into hydrogen, deuterium, and heavy nuclear targets to make precise measurements on the anti-quark sea. This will be much more satisfying than teaching I think.

Lots of homework has kept me from doing anything really interesting. My Quantum 2 professor is awesome, but the homework is really hard. The homework in Particle Physics is getting a bit difficult as well, as the last batch of homework included a problem than no one in the entire class was capable of solving. It is stuff I need to know for the field I'm going into though, so it isn't that bad. And after this semester, I will be mostly done with classes. I need two more, which I will probably take at a rate of one per semester while working on research.

When the summer hits, I should have a little more free time. I'll be working full time, which will mean I'll have most weekends free. I will take advantage of this to visit my friends who I haven't seen in a while.

Update

2009-02-05T12:25:00.004-06:00

I haven't posted in awhile, but I'm back now. Christmas break was fun, it was good to relax, but it was just too long. It is good to be back doing work stuff again. Unfortunately, my teaching load has been increased from 3 to 4 classes, giving me 100 students this semester. This probably won't seem like a lot to some people I know though. I teach from 8am to noon on Thursdays and Fridays. I don't like the 8am labs. Not only do I have to get up really early to be coherent by 8am, but my students in the 8am labs work more slowly than students at other times, and sometimes they don't complete the lab. I also got some student who asked me "do I have to show up for lab?" Lazy bum. I'm also tired of seeing my student's buttcracks. They really need to learn about belts.

I'm taking Quantum Mechanics 2 and Particle Physics 1. The latter I'm taking even though I'm missing a prerequisite. It's going to be a bit of work, but I really enjoy the topic so far. I think I'm going to try to get a research job in High Energy Physics.

Battle Sudoku!

2008-12-02T02:58:00.003-06:00

I've downloaded Visual C# Studio and I'm working on programming a game called Battle Sudoku. It's like Sudoku, except multiplayer, and whenever you complete a row, column, or square you'll gain power to hit your opponent with something nasty. It might rotate their board, flip it, or replace the numbers with different shapes, or something even meaner.

Microsoft is setting up this neat thing going where if you join a creator's club you can self-publish games on Xbox Live community games. You can even make money off of it. It has to pass peer review in order to be published to make sure it is bug free and content appropriate. If I get this thing working I might shell out the cash to get an Xbox 360 (necessary to submit the game) and the $100 for the creator club membership. Who knows, I might make a small profit.

Programming the game is very interesting. I have to write a program that is able to solve the puzzles and record the steps taken in solving the puzzle (for realistic AI). It also has to be able to generate puzzles according to difficulty. This means I have to learn Sudoku solving techniques in order to program the game. I'm learning all about naked and hidden quads, along with Swordfish, Jellyfish, XWings, and locked candidates. I completed a lot of code today, and I'm confidant I can get it do what I want. However, I am a bit worried about the efficiancy of my program; whether or not it can generate a puzzle and solution in a short amount of time. I've also been pondering about what options I could add. Anyone up for a 25X25 SuperDoku? Or for those less adept at puzzles, perhaps I could add a 4X4 and a 6X6 option.

Computer Issues

2008-11-10T14:59:00.003-06:00

I have used about 65 GB of my Hard Drive, but an extra 80 GB is used up and unaccounted for. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I'm kind of nervous because if I keep losing hard drive space my computer will be inoperable.

In the great tradition of Physics, I am naming this phenomenon "Dark Gigabytes".

What was terribly wrong with this year's election

2008-11-06T17:59:00.002-06:00

It was on Tuesday. I didn't get to watch House.

I can't think of a title, and a title isn't that important.

2008-10-13T00:16:00.004-05:00

I went to a bonfire on the "physics ranch" which is really some land with trees by a swamp with a shed and a fire pit. It wasn't a graduate student event, just some people who decided to go and invited some people along. I'm glad I was invited, and I'm starting to feel like I'm more of a part of the group now. I've made a conscious effort to hang out with the physics people I know and try to develop some friendships. My first year here I was overly reclusive, and the only fruit of that was feeling lonely and unhappy. Sometimes it feels like I really am making friends, other times I feel like I won't connect with other people like I did in Oxford. Of course, I can make great friendships without the people being replicas of Brian Whims, Dan Wu, or any of a dozen other people I could name. I want to be wary of not being satisfied until my life is exactly like it was, but I don't want to get bogged down trying to force relationships with people I really won't connect with when I could spend time looking elsewhere instead. Still, even if I haven't connected as closely I'm feeling happier now that I come out of my dorm room more often.

Still, it was fun. We burned stuff in a fire and ate dinner. Some of the things I said were greeted with laughter, some with awkward silence. An example of the latter would've been when I said it would be really bad to get a charlie horse in one's anal sphincter while taking a dump. Back in Oxford, someone would've laughed at that. Although I still like my friends who wouldn't have.

Oh, post with your name if you've read this post. I'm trying to get a good idea of who reads my blog.

Kerosene + Used Charcoal + Dumpster = Bad

2008-10-09T19:40:00.002-05:00

I was walking down the street this evening when I noticed that a dumpster next to the chemistry building was on fire. I ran inside and got someone to call 911, then pulled the fire alarm, then hunted down a fire extinguisher. Thankfully someone came on the scene who knew how to use the fire extinguisher I found. It wasn't sufficient to put it out though, only to keep it under control. It ran out of ammo surprisingly fast. After it ran out we each ran inside and grabbed another, but even two extinguishers at the same time weren't enough, and we had to wait for the firemen. The firemen put it out, and after some time they fished out a can of kerosene (Or some other type of cooking fuel). Some people had been holding a cookout earlier that day, so the current theory is they threw that away in the dumpster along with some used charcoal.

My Mouth vs. My Job

2008-10-08T22:22:00.002-05:00

It seems sometimes that I'm often about to say something while I'm working that will get me in trouble. For example, the lab manuals for the students have check boxes, which I'm supposed to check when they complete a section of the lab. However, when a girl asks me to check her box, I have to fight down the temptation to blurt out "But I'm not a gynecologist!"

Sometimes I do say things I shouldn't. One time a student couldn't get an experiment to work right, where he had to give a cart a push up a ramp, then let it go as the motion detector took data. I came over and tried to do it, in order to see what was wrong, but when I did it the experiment worked. The student then claimed it only worked from the left side, and not the right side. As the experiment was symmetrical, I pushed it from the right side and it worked again. At which point I declared that "I have empirically proven that your theory is as incorrect as it sounds."

Look for a post in a couple of days with more serious stuff in it.

Qualifying Exam

2008-08-29T17:16:00.001-05:00

I passed the qualifying exam for grad school. This is quite a relief, as it is a requirement for remaining in the program. I would've gotten one more shot, but it would've gone on my record.

One of my students hates my guts.

2008-08-18T11:40:00.003-05:00

The student evaluations I received for teaching this summer have been interesting. My students gave me 4's and 5's in every category. Except for one student, who gave me a 1 in every category. I can guess who it was. It was probably that student who I reprimanded for generating complaints from over half of my other students. Even after the semester has ended he continues to be a pain in the arse.

Sad News

2008-07-27T20:48:00.002-05:00

My grandmother died a little more than a week ago. She had a disease that made her slowly lose control of her body over a period of months. I wasn't very close to her, and only saw her about two or three times a year, but it was still quite sad, both seeing the disease progress and her death itself.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

2008-07-08T18:45:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I read a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. By the fact that I finished it in a single day, you can probably gather that I enjoyed it a lot. It has a lot of interesting information, including about how Helen Keller was a radical activist with communist leanings and what Christopher Columbus actually did in the new world (leader of a band of murdering, pillaging, rapists). It goes over not just interesting pieces of history, but the main sources of bias in history books and problems with the structure of history books as well. I would really recommend reading this book.

Evolution: Some Common Misconceptions

2008-07-07T06:30:00.002-05:00

This is the first post of two on the topic of evolution. The purpose of this post is to clear up some common misconceptions on evolution that I have seen many of my friends express, as well as some other common misconceptions.

Evolution is often referred to as only a theory. In scientific circles, theory does not refer to a tentative hypothesis, or some sort of guess, nor does it imply any amount of uncertainty. It is a framework that is used to explain a collection of facts. The theory of gravity is not an unheard of phrase in physics circles, yet no scientist doubts the existence of gravity. The fact that evolution is called a theory is not grounds for doubt in the theory.

Evolution is not an atheistic agenda or an attempt to rule God out of the universe. It is accepted by the great majority of religious biologists as well as atheists. It isn't an attempt to rule God out of the universe because it can't be used that way.

Evolution is not faith-based. Even if evolution is not true, as long as people have examined the evidence and are honestly mistaken they are not taking something on faith. One could imply that those who are not educated on the matter but trust the consensus of scientists to be right most of the time are taking it on faith, but that is only a portion of those who believe in evolution. Anyway, the better word here would be trust, because it doesn’t have the connotations of irrational belief.

Nor is Evolution a theory that we came about by a random accident. While there is a random aspect, one can give a fairly good prediction of how a species will evolve based on the selection pressure in the environment.

Evolution is not called Darwinism in scientific circles. Darwinism is generally a term used be creationists to imply some sort of personality cult, or by people who have heard other people call it that. It is also used to distinguish the mainstream theory of evolution from the concept of guided evolution, however naturalistic evolution is a far better phrase here than Darwinism. Genetics, for example, is a major part of any current version of evolutionary theory; however Darwin knew nothing of genetics so Darwinism is quite a misnomer. The theory of evolution has undergone much change and improvement since Darwin's day as more and more evidence has poured in.

There is no controversy over evolution in the scientific community. While scientists can be quote-mined for sayings that make it look like they are expressing serious doubt in evolution, they are almost invariably debating about competing versions of the theory. Over 99% of scientists with doctorates in the field accept evolution.

Evolution is not a theory on the origin of life. Given that the first replicator, (Does not have to be, and almost definitely was not a cell or what we would understand as an organism) it explains the development of all the species on the planet to day.

Evolution is not untestable. Evolution could be proven false by all sorts of evidence were it to show up. If fossils for rabbits, horses, dogs, and other present day animals were discovered in the fossil record instead of the changes over time that we do see, that would be evidence against evolution instead of for it. If we find (which we do) that we share endogenous retroviruses ("Scars" on our DNA from certain types of viruses that infected our ancestor's DNA) with close descendants on the evolutionary tree, that is evidence for evolution. If such non-beneficial and random elements were not shared by our genetic cousins, that would be evidence against evolution.

Nor does evolution fail the scientific criteria of reproducibility. All that is demanded is that the research and experiments can be reproduced, not that the actual historical event be reproduced. And evolution can be reproduced in the lab to a significant degree. Bacteria reproduce so fast one can cover thousands of generations in a few years.

Nor is the theory of evolution responsible for leading to the holocaust, or any other eugenics attempt. Darwin's idea was not that the fittest should survive, but that the process of natural selection is what created the variety of species we see. The idea that you can get the traits you want in your livestock by controlling which animals breed is artificial selection and has been around since ancient history. The holocaust is based on those ideas, Hitler's appeal to evolution makes no more sense than his appeal to Christianity in his campaign to eliminate what he considered to be inferior races.

Similarly, the theory of evolution is a theory on how species originated, it has no moral implications on how humans should act. It no more leads to the belief that every man should fend for himself than the theory of gravity leads to the belief that you should push people off cliffs.

This list of misconceptions might be expanded later.

I've joined the Blogosphere

2008-07-07T05:57:00.003-05:00

Yeah, I've made a blog. The layout will probably change as soon as I become more competent at editing it. Updates will be whenever, like when I have an opinion to share, or a question to ask all my friends, or some update to my life that I want everyone to know. Mostly I've made this because I find it a hassle to talk to everyone separately for some of the things I have to say, especially when I don't know who will care about any given topic. So I hope you'll check this regularly, like at least once a week, if you're a friend of mine. Also, if you have a blog, post a comment with the link so I can start reading it and add a link to the side of my blog here. Or if you can link me to the blog of someone I know, post that too.