So, the time has finally come. My great 4th of July Adventure begins today!

I tricked several friends of mine into flying into Albuquerque and spending the next five days with me, caving near Carlsbad, camping at White Sands, and doing whatever we feel like. It's going to be great!

If you've ever used math, then you'll find Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics useful. It is surprisingly comprehensive, succinct, and helpful. It is the math resource.

Weisstein also created similar (though less complete) references for astronomy, chemistry, physics, and other topics - all available for free, online, at Eric's Treasure Troves of Science.

The usefulness of MathWorld is immediately apparent, and it occured to me yesterday that my field of study, computational fluid dynamics, could use such a resource. I am hereby declaring my intention to create Mouser's World of Hydro or something like that. If it takes off, I could possibly extend this to all of simulation physics.

Doctoral qualifying exams cover a broad range of disciplines. The subject de jour is matrix eigenvectors. Now if that hasn't gotten you excited...

I took a study break to watch "Journey to the Center of the Earth." It features scenes filmed in Carlsbad Cavern. Several scenes were noticably Left Hand Tunnel, at least one was in the King's Palace. It's painfully obvious when they cut from a scene filmed in an actual cave to a hollywood set with transparent rocks, giant mushrooms, and canabalistic iguanas. But man I love those plaid trousers...

OK, the movie sucks. If you haven't seen it, here's the spoiler: they escape a bluescreen salamander by shooting out of a volcano in a bathtub from Atlantis. My eyes hurt.

Whoa! Part of the Natural Entrance Route of Carlsbad Caverns National Park collasped! In a followup article, the Albuquerque Journal reports that they hope to have the debris cleared by this weekend. This is fortunate, because I'm bringing some friends there on Sunday.

I'm a bit worried because Cliff has organized a special trip to the Guadalupe Room for us, and from what it sounds like, the three ton boulders are very close to the entrance to the Guadalupe Room.

So, I just got off the phone with the FBI.

There's something mysterious and exciting about the FBI saying they want to interview you about an issue of national security. It becomes somewhat less exciting when you discover that they only wanted to talk to you because of an error in their records about where your office is and how much clearance you have.

Apparently, my official records list me as having a high security clearance and having an office near where the hard drives disappeared over at the lab. I was this close to getting a polygraph. Damn.

So at Kevin's birthday party last night, I ended up making "chocolate mousers" for a bunch of people. It seems to be a popular drink.

Afterwards, we went to Joy's place to watch Law & Order. There, I met the fatest cat in the universe, Romulus. Robbie and Dallas and I threw riddles and math puzzles at each other until 4am.

If you've seen Die Hard 3, then you know this one: You have a 3 gallon jug and a 5 gallon jug and an infinite supply of water. How can you get exactly 4 gallons into the 5 gallon jug?

Here's another popular one: There are four people trying to get across a bridge. No more than two people can be on the bridge at one time. Furthermore, any person or pair of people crossing the bridge must carry the flashlight with them. The people move at different speeds. They can cross the bridge in 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes, and 1 minute, respectively. Because there is only one flashlight, a pair of people can only cross the bridge at the speed of the slowest person. What is the shortest amount of time you can get everyone across in?

One more: You have 8 coins. You know that all of the coins have the same weight except one, which is lighter. How many measurements on a balance are necessary to determine which coin is the light one?

The solutions to these riddles are in comments within the source to this page.

Today was Kevin's birthday, so we took him out to dinner at Gabriel's and then went back to Mary's place for cake and music. Kevin and Mary declared C.J. Bolland and the Propellerheads to be "awesome."

Also, I mixed up a few white russians for those present, and decided to add Hershey's chocolate syrup to see how it would taste. Turns out it's really good. There was a debate over what to call the drink, chocolate russian and brown russian were nominated. But in the end, they decided to name the drink in my honor, the "Chocolate Mouser."

I have my own drink! And this from a person who drinks about one white russian a month.

Yesterday, I made the best fake ever in ultimate. The guy actually fell over and hurt himself.

I faked left; ran right. He steped left, turned on the wet grass, fell on his knee, and tore it open. Yikes! It was really gross. And he just let it bleed.

Speaking of ultimate, I hereby give myself the Yellow Badge of Courage for attending. I had to walk home from work, and a storm was descending. I made a decision to deal with the thunder and to play ultimate anyway.

I got really sick, but I played and I stayed the entire time. Helluva storm too.

I know all of my faithful readers out there are really big into hydrodynamics, so I'm sure you've all heard of the Lax-Wendroff advection algorithm. Yes, yes, we all have. We all write simulators that use the Lax-Wendroff, and despite it's inherent oscillitory artifacts behind discontinuties, we love it.

Ok, so who am I kidding. No one that reads this has ever heard of Lax-Wendroff. But it's an algorithm I deal with everyday. And today.... I met Burton Wendroff. Mr. Wendroff. It's kind of like being a biologist and meeting Charles Darwin or something. He's a celebrity in my field, and I just ran into him at lunch.

I recognized his face from the picture on his website. I didn't realize he worked at the lab. But there I was eating my lunch when this grey-haired man with a pony tail walks by, reminding me of George Carlin with glasses.

John was kind enough to introduce him to me, and now I'm having a meeting with him next week to discuss my implementation of his algorithm! Wow I'm a big dork, but this is so cool!

So my friend Jessica got all her CDs stolen, and is replacing them all with MP3s. She was asking me to recommend some songs to download from Gnutella. Aphex, Future Sound, Autechre, Massive Attack... I'd type in a band and a song title and she'd go search for it. I actually got her to search online for a band called "Candied Ass Rangers."

Wednesday nights in Los Alamos mean pickup volleyball. Through some clerical error, it seems that I am still able to serve. I haven't played good outdoor vollleyball since the meatmarket games at Coe. A little sore. Just a little.

I desperately want one of those Mattel Hot Wheels PC computers. The hardware and software are mostly crap. But the case! Oh how I long for a computer case with Bitchin' Flame Decals.

Not really my day, I guess. At lunch, I managed to get an entire large glass of ice water right into my crotch.

I went back home to change before heading in to work, but left my filing cabinet key in the pocket of my damp trousers. So when I got back to the ubercube [hey, does your cubicle have five stories of vertical space? I didn't think so.] I couldn't get my laptop out of the cabinet.

Oh, and I suppose it goes without saying that the computer services people still haven't given me an IP.

Oh, and I got an email today from someone who asked a very poignant question: should I really be writing posts like the above one when I'm trying to get a security clearance? So, I just thought I'd make it absolutely clear for the men in black who may read my web crap in search of evidence that I work for the Chinese or have a penchant for stealing hard drives: I have never done drugs nor do I intend to. And for that matter, I've never stolen a hard drive, proliferated state secrets, assisinated anyone, or sold cow lips to space aliens.

And I promise not to tell anyone about that mind-control ray we're working on here at the lab.

So I went to watch the colloquium here at LANL featuring Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt. At the last minute, they moved it form the large main auditorium to the small physics auditorium. The 400+ people that showed up were too much for the 200 seats.

Everyone who was a lab employee got kicked out and told to watch it with realvideo from their offices. But, of course, our information infrastructure is so half-assed here that i saw about one frame per second, and by the end the audio was about five minutes ahead of the video. What a crock.

So the first day at the office was pretty much as expected. No one seemed to know which cubicle was mine, there was no phone service for awhile, and the network people never showed up to give me an IP address. [Yes, even though I can talk to them on the phone, they have to come by in person to tell me my IP address. It's the only thing I need.]

I couldn't work on my work because the division is still all screwed up due to the recent security breach. So, I spent most of the day counting the minutes until I could go play ultimate.

Ultimate was great. The altitude wasn't bothing me much, and I made one good lay out catch. A lot of the people from last year were back, as well as some new faces. We went back to Mary's apartment afterwards to watch the Lakers win the championship (take that, Larry Bird, you twat) and eat pizza.

I feel somewhat bad that I've lost the last month's worth of opportunity to hang out with these people, they're really a lot of fun. And now there's only just over a month left in my stay here.

Upon my return home, I randomly settled in front of the TV and watched a Bill Maher stand-up routine. I never realized how smart his comedy is. And it's not just because I agree with him in his cynical views - I don't always. Or, I should say, I didn't. Bill Maher said some things tonight that changed my point of view on something I've always been adamantly against.

Drug use. I've always thought of drug use as stupid. And anyone who chooses to use a drug is making a stupid decision. Now don't get nervous, I'm not about to start doing drugs of any sort. I've still never smoked a cigarette and the number of times I've been remotely drunk I can count on one hand. But Maher said something that really registered with me. It just makes sense.

People seem to have this idea that longevity and perfect physical health should be the most important motivations in everyone's life. I see now that there's no reason why this should be the case. Some things can be beneficial and dangerous at the same time. Fun can come at a cost, and that's a price that some people are willing to pay. And that's OK.

"Sammy Davis Jr. lived to be 64. I'd much rather have 64 Sammy years than 150 Ken Starr years."

And, you know, that just makes sense to me. Furthermore, he pointed out that we judge drugs on the habits of the losers. We don't judge automobile usage on the tendencies of losers, why drugs?

None of this changes anything about my stance on taking drugs myself. I still believe that there isn't a recreational drug out there that is worth the cost to me (and I'm not talking about money). But, I now look very differently at others that choose to use drugs responsibly. If it doesn't affect me directly (I still won't tolerate second hand smoke or drunk drivers, etc.), then its none of my business.

It's a strange feeling having a paradigm shift.

I was only expecting to be in Carlsbad for three to five days. It turned into 3.5 weeks. Half a gallon of whole milk undergoes a strange transformation in 3.5 weeks.

Addendum: Mike informs me that the rabbit-deer that I saw were Mule Deer. Damn, and I thought I had discovered a hidden race of giant bunnies.

My last day in Carlsbad for awhile. John and I are driving back to Los Alamos this evening. I've been here for almost a month.

I came to New Mexico to work at Los Alamos for the summer. I spent exactly three days there and then promptly came down to Carlsbad, where I've been since. The bean counters in the X Division office are starting to wonder if I exist and whether or not I should really be getting these paychecks.

Since I report directly to John and I can do my work from anywhere, it doesn't matter where I am in terms of productivity. But The Man™ isn't very flexible so it's time to make an appearance in my office.

The Pros:
I'll get to play ultimate again with the Los Alamos team. I'll be less distracted by the caves and more likely to get good studying done for my qualifying exams. I'll be in a town with other people my age. Chili Works Breakfast Burittos, baby!

The Cons:
No caving. No river in the back yard. A smaller apartment. Having to sit in an office for 10 hours/day. Los Alamos seems to be cursed lately, what with the fires and the floods and the missing secrets; I expect to be infested with locusts or something before the summer is up.

I got up at 6:00am to go investigate the entrance to Black Cave.

I was following the "step log" which gives instructions like "40 degrees magnetic for 242 steps" and managed to get myself onto the totally wrong ridge. There was supposed to be an intersecting trail after 522 steps, but after about 2,000 steps I hadn't found one.

So I took the scenic route, but eventually found the entrance. The gate is guarded by a small army of daddy longlegs spiders. Yucky.

The drive up to the trailhead is a wild 4x4 experience. I've never been on so rocky/muddy a road. My poor rental car will never survive this on July 1; I'm going to have to borrow John's Bronco again.

Oh, and I saw three tarantulas, some vultures, and a rabbit the size of a small deer. Or maybe it was a small deer with really big ears.

I'd never been inner-tubing behind a speedboat before. Wow that's a rush. When he makes those 35mph banks and I go skidding across the wake on the verge of flipping over, the adrenaline really gets going. I went alone on the tube, laying down. The group before me had three people sitting on the tube, and they got flipped in what looked like it would lead to brutal injuries. Everyone was fine, but I was kinda nervous when i saw the boat bank over for the first time...

Also tonight was my first appearance at the Pecos Valley Grotto meeting. I would have guessed that in an area like this that has the highest density of caves in the world, there would be a ton of people in the grotto. But it's about one quarter the size of Boston Grotto, where there are no caves at all. Strange.

But, I met the right people and watched some cool videos about single rope technique and made arrangements to get a caving permit for the July 4th holiday weekend for some friends and I. Yeah!

Today I got caving permits for the weekend that everyone's coming to visit. We're going to Black Cave and Cottonwood Cave. The guy working at the forest service office was one of the people from the grotto meeting last night, so the procedure was relatively painless. I also went out and bought myself a caving helmet and a real headlamp. So I guess this means I'm a real caver now.

I was supposed to help survey a cave last night but the guy who was in charge of getting the permit screwed something up and didn't get the gate key, so we couldn't go. let-down.

Today was the last day of the particle astrophysics conference.

The morning was spent discussing the future of WIPP as a facility for low-background radiation physics experiments. It sounds like there's a lot of strong interest in making this happen, which is a Really Good Thing for the future of particle astrophysics in America.

The afternoon was spent on a tour of the WIPP underground and waste handling facility. I wrote about this tour the last time I took it. This time, it was basically the same except there were more tourists and we didn't get to see drilling in progress. I did, however, get to look at Ernst's neutrino experiment, which was very exciting.

Did you all go out and celebrate Flag Day today? I know I did... I took two of the free flags they were giving away at lunch and stuck them in my bandana.

Once, on Arbor Day, I tried to put an entire tree in my bandana. It really hurt.

So I just got back from a trip to Slaughter Canyon Cave.

I'd been to this cave once before, in January, but it was on the ranger-guided tour arranged through the park service for tourists. This was a private nightime expedition arranged by Cliff.

The sun was setting as we made the short hike to the entrance. Slaughter Canyon is beautiful.

I saw some things in the cave that I missed last time including some ancient indian petroglyphs, an albino cave cricket, and a phosphorescent stalagmite. This was a great caving trip, and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves.

On the way down from the entrance, we found a small diamondback rattlesnake sitting beside the trail. It was very docile, and didn't rattle or coil at all until we bothered it. It climbed up into a bush and coiled to strike when Cliff tossed some dirt on it. I'd never seen a wild snake before, and never a rattlesnake at all.

Slaughter Canyon is even more beautiful by the light of an almost-full moon. Pristine.

It's a small tangled world we live in.

I'm a graduate student at MIT, and I mildly enjoy Star Trek. One of my flatmates is a guy called Evan, whose mother is the editor and agent for author/physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss, who wrote the very engaging book, The Physics of Star Trek. Krauss, as it happens, also got his degree from MIT. My reserach for MIT involves me working at Los Alamos National Laboratory with a man called John. John's wife is the director of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The WIPP doubles as a storage facility for nuclear waste and a low-background underground facility for scientific reserach. Most of the experiments planned for WIPP involve detecting neutrinos. Today was the first day of an astrophysics conference in Carlsbad for researchers wanting to do neutrino experiments at the WIPP. The banquet talk was given by Dr. Krauss, and was an elaborate multimedia persentation on the material from his book re: star trek science and science fiction.

Somehow the coincidence of me meeting someone who's good friends with my roommate while at an astrophysics conference on the other side of the country (and also happens to be one of my favorite authors) seems interesting to me.

Anyway, I think Krauss is going to be the next great "popularizer" of science. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov were certainly two of the greatest, and both of them were idols of mine as I was growing up. I always wanted to meet them and shake their hand because of the enormous impact they had on me, but sadly they both died before I got the chance. While I was unaware of Krauss until recently, his work is clearly going to have a similar effect on the next generation and it was an honor to meet him.

"If the door is open," he says, "then I went back to Los Alamos. If it's closed, then I'm still asleep and we'll go to the conference together."

Well, I got up early early early and waited for that door to open for four hours. Missed the first half of today's talks before I gave up on him. Turns out he left but closed the door anyway. Frustratotron.

I taught a kid how to swim today. This morning, he wouldn't go into water that he couldn't stand in, and wouldn't submerge his head. By dinner, he was surface-diving for rocks in the deep end.

Fear is a fickle thing.

New Mexico is a big state. And not too many people live there. At 315,113 sq. kilometers, it's the fifth largest state in the country. The total population is about 1,740,000, and Albuquerque accounts for almost one third of that. Outside of Albuquerque, every person in New Mexico has 4 square kilometers to themself (statistically speaking, anyway).

The point is that there's no shortage of horizonal space here at all.

I can't remember the last time I went up any stairs. I don't think I've ascended a single flight since I moved here. It's weird.

Cliff is the caving god. He is hooking me up with a wild caving trip for my friends and I over the July 4th weekend. Social networking is such a good thing.

As much fun as I'm having out here in Carlsbad, I find myself missing some of the nerdier aspects of my life which are on hiatus back in Cambridge.

I miss the roof & tunnel hacking, I miss the railgun, and I especialy miss - oh how I miss it - my cablemodem. This 28.8 crap has got to go. It's Lag-Tastic!

Ladies and Gentlemen, Photo Gallery version 1.0 is alive! yay!

Ever since I got my first digital camera back in 1997 (thanks, Nichol - oh, and Happy Birthday), I've been taking pictures of just about everything and they're laying around here on my hard drives, various Jaz carts, and burned onto CDs.

I've always wanted to make these photos available on the web sorta like what Philip does on Photo.Net. Previous attempts to do so manually have failed due to the amount of annoying HTML coding involved. I gave up on hand-coding pages for my Europe photos after about 10 of them.

Tonight, I finally got around to writing a script that will do all the database work for me. I can just type in informaton about each photo and the script will generate a nice page for me. What a relief. Now, I just have to organize the photos and type in some descriptions.

I've begun with photos I took a few weeks ago of fire damage up in Los Alamos. Just click on the photo to the left to see it (and admire the dynamically-generated gallery page. woo!) Since I have hundreds of images I'd like to show laying around, I'll start throwing them in with these entries when I have time. They may not be topical, but you can just deal.

Just went to the bat flight again. It was much better tonight than it was last week. 300,000 bats in a big tornado, spewing out of the ground. Not much else like it on the planet.

The funny thing about the bat flight program is that the rangers don't know when they'll start coming out, so they get everyone sitting in the ampitheater, and then they just sit there and talk out of their asses for about 45 minutes until something happens. I feel kinda sorry for them.

Bonus: for the first time in my life, I saw a wild tarantula. Big sucker, probably 15cm across. Then, 15 minutes later, I saw my second wild tarantula. It was crossing the road that leads up to the cave entrance. I hummed the Frogger theme in salute to it's journey.

Good Scrabble word: vug. n. - a hole in a rock too small to fit a person through.

So my trip to the Left Hand Tunnel of Carlsbad Cavern today was somewhat of a let down. It turns out they've declared the Bell Cord Room and the Lake of the Clouds off-limits due to fragility and a roost of bats at the lake, so we didn't get to see either.

Without them, the Left Hand Tunnel is just a long straight passageway with very little decoration. There were a few minor exceptions that were interesting and I did get to visit passageways I'd never been in before, but it was certainly a lot less that I was hoping for.

I did meet a woman named Holley that is doing her Ph.D. research in a cave in Belize. She's researching the connection between Mayan religion and caverns. Apparently, they liked to sacrifice their kids in caves and leave strange pottery laying about. Anyway, she had fascinating stories to tell and actually invited me to come down and work for her as an intern. As much as I would love to, The Man™ owns my soul for at least the next few years.

"it was so strange being with all these guys who can kill with their hands. like being in a wierd gang or something." -rh

What is it that all hong kong action movie directors find so appealing about motocross bikes?

I swear, if I see one more kung fu henchman with an uzi on a flourescent green bike doing a wheelie, I'm going to start watching westerns.

Addendum: If you're going to make a martial arts film with gymnasts instead of martial artists, at least spare us the inevitable scene in which our hero pommel horses his enemies to death.

Being a city kid, I'm just not used to all this... nature. Who knew fishing for catfish and watching the sun set could be so relaxing? I'm experiencing some serious cognative dissonance here, people. I should really be spending every available minute writing my simulators for Los Alamos and studying for my doctoral qualifying exam in September.

I stayed up till 5:00am coding and, as a result, missed an opportunity to go to Lost Cave and learn surveying techniques. That's a good thing, right?

Hey do you know the Coldcut song, "More Beats & Pieces?" Well it's wacky and fun and I like it a whole big bunch.

And I'm wondering what a particular sample is: right at the end (in the video when the weird Voltron-looking dude appears and the speakers knock the doll-heads off) what song is that being sampled??

Speaking of Voltron, "Activate interlock. Dynotherms connected. Infracells up. Megathrusters are go!" "Go Voltron Force!"