- The blindering continues: unfollowing all non-personal Twitter contacts until 2010, after my PhD is done. #
- I know, this shouldn't seem strange, but I'm actually looking forward to going to AGU. #
- Petitioning CU for my fall registration (email has been in my inbox since… May 4th) and writing my AGU abstract. #
- I'm not completely trustworthy. The weird thing is, I feel compelled to tell people that up front. Sometimes. #
- I wish it was really possible for headphones to do bass well. #
- 1 liter smoothie + 1 liter tea = too much liquid for breakfast. Solution? Make smoothie w/ iced tea instead of juice! Fruity stimulation. #
- Somehow having 1000+ unread RSS feed items makes it so much easier to just ignore them all. #
- both disgusted by and enamored with homemade baconfat tostada shells. #
- we will change the world, whether we want to or not. #
- Did I just find that bug, or create it? Bedtime. #
- Looking forward to our crazy landlady's first visit in years tomorrow! Not. #
- wrote a script to chain together all my accumulated analysis so far… letting it slog through the morning. Now sleep, and await the heat. #
- You have done well my silicon minions. You do not know fear! You do not know pain! You will taste manflesh! #
- Landlady was contacted by insurance co. (not City). Has less idea what's going on than we do. This one, maybe I fix. #
- Michelle has actually aged since we met. It's comforting and disturbing at the same time. #
- Wrote a thesis todo list. I'm sure it's incomplete, but I'm going to have a pint of cider anyway. #
- vote for bike trails and directions in Google Maps! http://bit.ly/1FWgoL #
- It almost looks like Brown Mountain has turned into a volcano. #
- It almost looks like Brown Mountain has turned into a volcano: http://bit.ly/ULqY2 #
- good overview of bicycle health and safety statistics (helmets, accidents, obesity, etc): http://bit.ly/3duRn3 #
- I hope it's possible for poor employees to be good business owners. #
- I made fresh pesto from the garden. Eating some with polenta that I cooked in my big insulated french press. #
- Economists talk about the price of anarchy. I think what Popper is talking about is the price of order. Efficiency instead of resilience. #
- Thyrsus is definitely my new favorite word: http://bit.ly/16V1fA #
- I may just have to ship my laptop out to Colorado separately, to avoid the possibility of any digital body cavity searches by the TSA. #
- maxing out both cores, all 4GB of memory in use, and I have the gall to be annoyed that my music is skipping. #
- I can't believe I've been sitting here for 13 hours. #
- Feeling strangely fascinated by the prospect of friending all my cousins in Fresno on FB. #
- going to go eat dinner on the roof and watch Mount Wilson burn. #
Monthly Archive for August, 2009
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of August 28th, 2009′
I have lots of draft posts in progress here on the back end, calling to me whenever I log in like internet sirens:
- The Scale and Form of Cities, about how one might design a city from the ground up today, with efficient resource utilization and conviviality in mind. A follow up to What Are Cities For?
- Corporate Paternalism, about the ways in which we (especially conservatives) seem to have more faith in corporations than our elected representatives when it comes to making decisions for us.
- Our Newtonian Hangover, about the non-linear, non-deterministic nature of history and technology, and James Burke’s excellent BBC series The Day the Universe Changed and Connections. Miraculously, they are almost as relevant today as they were 30 years ago, and we are in the process of implementing one of the strange futures he foretold.
- The dunes told me to work on passive buildings, which is a more personal and spiritual response to the NREL interview questions than seemed appropriate for a job interview.
- and a magnum opus entitled What’s Wrong With Graduate School, that examines both how my own graduate career has been uniquely flawed, why I believe the graduate education system as a whole is in general broken, and a vision of what I think higher education might look like by the time any offspring I could conceivably have would be there.
However, at the moment the thing most wrong with graduate school is that I’m still in it. My PhD defense has been tentatively scheduled for November 20th, and I’m going to the AGU fall meeting in San Francisco in mid-December to present my work, so I’m going to be completely occupied until the beginning of 2010. There will be no further blog updates between now and then. Or at least, there shouldn’t be. If you see me making posts, don’t read them. Instead ridicule me in person, or offer up some kind of digital castigation.
Of course, you can still read my mind keep in touch with me via my linkstream, my tweets, and my photos. Oh, and of course there’s always e-mail and the telephone.
- Early to bed, early to rise actually feels kinda nice. But also totally abnormal. #
- Got my 30 inch display back from Apple service. Somehow they got a white thread sandwiched into the LCD. *sigh* http://flic.kr/p/6QdXCr #
- Your latest song is leaked as a torrent, what do you do? If you're Radiohead, you capitalize on the free publicity: http://bit.ly/tKrN2 #
- Okay I give in, I'll do the golden section search thing. #
- Interdisciplinary work in the natural sciences gets more citations. Curiously, this is not true in the social sciences: http://bit.ly/ZsvQk #
- Trying to think only in vectors. And failing. #
- Advocates of Neptune/Triton exploration are enlisting the youngest scientists, because of multi-decade planning and travel times. #longnow #
- Must. Contact. Thesis. Committee. Now. #
- I'm feeling computationally limited. #
- Both vindicatied and annoyed that what I was doing before works just as well, and is like a bazillion times faster. #
- Okay, today I'm totally going to contact my committee. For reals this time. #
- Leaked memo from oil industry detailing their astroturf campaign against CO2 emission reductions, via Greenpeace: http://bit.ly/WCPqC #
- I miss the worms, but they're in a better place now (SF). #
- Wow, Pasadena water shortage violations carry up to a $1000 fine (for repeat offenders): http://bit.ly/OPbOZ #
- Got editorial feedback from Aaron. He says of the paper "It's done, just kill it already!". Confidence for committee calling acquired. #
- I hope AGU will let me submit an abstract for the fall meeting even though I paid my 2009 dues a day after the August 20th deadline… #
- Okay okay. I. Did. It. Now hopefully there won't be any drama or fireworks. #
- Need to organize a weekly foraging trip, with a variety of possible destinations so we don't end up burning any one of them out. #
- I find myself with only half-caf coffee in the house. I suppose I'll just have to use twice as much. #
- It's nice to spend an evening in thoughtful disagreement with someone. Probably better than mindless affirmation. #
- The poorest humans spend 10 times as much on alcohol and prostitutes as on educating their children. Ah, men. http://bit.ly/23Xmv5 #
- Bank that owns next door house called in our yard to CIty, who sent notice to wrong address, then we failed the 2nd inspection. Now what? #
- Looks like I'll probably be defending Nov. 20th. #
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of August 20th, 2009′
- Do you think bicyclists should be represented on CA Traffic Control Devices Committee? Tell Devinder.Singh@dot.ca.gov http://bit.ly/rairw #
- T-60 days and counting. (The T is for Thesis) #
- New Belgium's Tour de Fat almost makes me wish I had a car, just so I could trade it in for a bike, faith-healer style: http://bit.ly/2Ypkl #
- nodding off. must. brush. teeth…. #
- It's funny to realize that despite having been to someone's house dozens of times, over years, you have no idea what their address is. #
- Just reported four people for running their lawn sprinklers in the heat of the day. Does that make me a prick? http://bit.ly/1w4mel #
- Got my Hunter S. Thompson Freak Power! shirt. I can't believe he was almost the Sheriff of Aspen. http://bit.ly/TbCDx #
- I would surrender, if only it would make the endlessly circling police helicopters go away. But they don't want me. (yet) #
- There are only so many lucid hours in the day. They begin now. #
- Who would have thought Caltrans could be so personable and responsive? http://bit.ly/g9fD1 #
- Have had to restore information from backups twice today. Thank goodness for SVN and Time Machine. #
- Surprisingly satisfying to start putting words and figures into a file called Thesis.ltx #
- Went to bed at midnight, still didn't wake up until 10:30am. What's wrong with me? #
- Stay out of Malibu, Lebowski! Point Dume State Beach may be slated for closure, under pressure from the rich & famous. http://bit.ly/1sBk6y #
- Vastly more people have played The Oregon Trail than ever emigrated via the Oregon Trail. What a fascinating modern age it is we live in. #
- Thank you California for legalizing sensible graywater systems. Now that wasn't so painful really, was it? http://bit.ly/32n8aB #
- I feel silly (and good) for missing @michelleselvans after only 4 days. #
- Time to hitch up the trailer and go foraging. #
- Tonight it was berry season: blue, black and rasp. Pounds of them. Plus eggs (of course), grapes, chicken salad, apples and a bit o cheese #
- might be as much a non-theist Quaker as a freegan. Definitions-wise anyway. Community participation obviously makes a difference though. #
- Honestly, the way grad students act and feel about never having been doing enough work is downright Catholic. #
- I am a digital pack rat, but I think my grandkids and the family AI will probably appreciate it: http://bit.ly/MDYi8 #
I’m a little bit of an information pack rat. I started blogging before there were blogs, from UGCS. It seemed mildly neurotic and self involved and exhibitionist at the time. I mostly did it for my mom as a way to keep in touch without having to e-mail all the time. I’ve lost information here and there, even digital information (which seems kind of unforgivable), but analog too. Actually, I think more I just didn’t create much analog information. Five intense months of life, bicycling across Europe in 1994. Maybe 2 rolls of film total? Almost no photos from my summer in Russia. Both my parents were avid photographers. My dad professionally (though eventually he tired of the weddings and quinceañeras, and retreated to a steady stream of passport and similar photos… para las micas rosas, y para amnestia…) and my mom (so far as I can tell) more personally. Family pictures, documentarian style, wildflowers, and some prizes in the Fresno County Fair. But I never got into it, until I got a digital camera in 1999. My first piece of digital film was a 64 MB compact-flash card (incredibly, several times larger than the 20 MB hard disk in my first computer, which I got in 1993). It cost about $100. The camera was a Nikon Coolpix 700, with 2.1 MP sensor and no zoom. I bought it in an online auction (at Yahoo!) for $425, but had the seller leave me feedback at eBay (you could leave anyone feedback for anything back then). I mailed the check, and he mailed the camera, simultaneously, trusting each other. I still have our e-mails. The pictures could go directly to the web… via the web server I had running in my bedroom in Santa Cruz. I still have those pictures. No developing. No cost-per-click of the shutter. Kayaking through Southeast Alaska with Becky in the summer of 2000 I had to limit the resolution to 640 x 480 to avoid running out of space over 3 months, and I couldn’t use the LCD lest I run out of batteries, but at least I took the pictures, and kept them.
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of Aug 14th’
I’ve made this parody before:
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat until the fish are extinct.
All indications are that our grandkids won’t be big fans of sashimi, as it will either be too expensive for them, or virtually non-existent, because we have driven the large fish species to (or near) extinction. We’ve been making fish smaller, and less plentiful for millennia. This is no huge surprise. We ate all the tasty North American megafauna when we got here too. We were hungry, and we didn’t know any better. The world and its resources seemed vast beyond our comprehension.
The situation today is tragic partly because we know exactly what we’re doing, and partly because we could be sustainably harvesting vastly more fish today than we are currently mining at an unsustainable rate, if only we could somehow contrive to let fish stocks rebound to their Pleistocene levels. At those very high (pre-human) stocking rates, the sustainable take would be enormous, but we would have to manage the harvest carefully with quotas (which we didn’t do the first time around, and which we are much better equipped to do now). Such quotas are sometimes discussed as if they were purely economic or political quantities, but in some important ways they are neither.
Hello Mr. Singh,
As a person who uses a bicycle as almost my only form of transportation, not being detected by traffic signals often makes me feel like some kind of outlaw, even though I am very explicitly operating my vehicle within California law. This difference between the letter and the implementation of the law contributes to the mistaken perception, by drivers, law enforcement officials and cyclists alike, that bikes somehow have both fewer legal rights and less responsibility to obey the rules of the road.
It has come to my attention that there is nobody on the California Traffic Control Devices Committee (CTCDC) who represents the interests of the non-motorized elements of traffic, though there are multiple representatives from the state’s automobile clubs. Under AB 1581 (now CVC 21450.5) bicycles are entitled to be detected by the devices that CTCDC oversees, but with no representation on the committee it seems unlikely that the decisions it takes will reflect our needs. Many other jurisdictions (e.g. Copenhagen, Denmark) that have decided to incorporate cycling meaningfully into their transportation networks have successfully solved the technical problems associated with detecting and directing the flow of bicycle traffic, and so I do not feel that “we don’t have the technology” is really a viable excuse. What we lack is the political will, and I think that having some direct representation of non-motorized traffic on the CTCDC would help facilitate finding that political will.
Sincerely,
Zane Selvans
CC: Ken McGuire (Caltrans Bicycle Program Manager)
Continue reading ‘California traffic signals should detect bikes’
