On the way home from work today, I got a call from Dan on my cell phone telling me that he was in a Hummer stuck on a sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande. That's one you don't hear every day. There should be pictures available soon. Although he was over 100 meters from the shore, his friends were on the way with winches so he wasn't in trouble or anything. But it was funny that his AIM away message at the time read "Not not getting the Hummer stuck in the Rio Grande."

Nina got her telescope working last night and we looked at Jupiter and three of its moons, a half-phase Venus, and a nice half moon. We also went rock climbing at the gym, and I kept working on 5.9's. I can do most of the 5.9 routes at the gym when I'm fresh. Once I can do them all I'll move up and start working on the 5.10a's. I think I'm back to where I was with my climbing ability before I had surgery.

Actually saw and spoke to Molvig today. He's in town for a committee meeting that he chairs. He's going to swing by my office tomorrow and I'll get him "caught up" on where my thesis stands. Haven't talked to him in months before today.

Now I'm off to a search & rescue training meeting in Santa Fe.

While caving last month I managed to fall on a rock and slice a good chuck out of my thumb. Nothing serious, but a patch of skin about 1 cm² was totally gone. Watching it heal over the following weeks, I was struck by the fact that my fingerprint grew back in exactly the same pattern.

Now bear with me, because I'm a biology idiot (anyone who knows about the bio component of my doctoral qualifying exams can vouch for that). I know that the information that defines our physical appearance is stored in our DNA, but I sort of figured that a given cell's DNA would mostly describe its own role only.

The fact that my fingerprint grew back must mean that the new cells that grew in the place of the wound were imparted with the information they needed somehow from existing cells. To me this indicates that the information needed for every cell is contained in every other cell, or at least in some "management" cells. But then why does the body not re-grow amputated limbs? Is it simply that the information relating to skin cells has an off-site backup, whereas other cells don't necessarily?

OK, so for the time being let's just say that skin cells know what all other skin cells should "look like." so if I accidentally cut off skin cell A, a new skin cell will replace it and will be more or less genetically identical. The information about what it should "look like" is contained in its DNA, along with the information about what every other skin cell should look like. This means that it must have some means of identifying which part of the whole system it is. Like an identifier string.

Now that would be cool... if every cell had a an ID that was stored internally... then you could identify where on the body a particular skin cell came from in addition to who's body, just by analyzing its DNA.

But what if this idea is crap, and there is no unique identifier for each cell that tells it how to interpret the total-body DNA in its possession? Then something would have to be telling it what to do, either a neighboring cell or some sort of management-from-afar. How would that information be transmitted? If this was the case, then could you intercept the transmission and alter it? Cut off some skin and have the wound grow back with the wrong fingerprint? Have it grow back liver tissue?

Maybe I should stick to physics.

Just packed up my gear for this weekend's trip. I'm going down to the Guadalupe Mountains in SE New Mexico for another fun weekend of the High Guads Restoration Project. This is the second month that I'll be working on my new project.

While I'm camping up on the ridge, I should have an excellent view of the five bright planets currently visible in the night sky. We may not get the aurora borealis here that I used to see when I lived in Minnesota, but at least we have exquisitely clear skies.

On the way down there, I'm stopping by for lunch with Dan in Socorro. Should be fun.

Since their launch last summer, I've been very interested in the Mars Exploration Rover missions. It's great to see not only that they have successfully landed and retrieved useful scientific data, but also that the hypotheses of the principal investigators are turning out to be correct! It looks like there was actually standing water on the surface of Mars, and that is a phenomenal discovery.

The Planetary Society put a DVD on each rover that has thousands of names burned onto it. A couple of years back you could sign up to have your name sent to Mars. A little cheesy, but... mine name is on there, so is Nina's. Just for fun, they encoded some messages on the labels of the DVDs so that when the rovers took pictures of the discs from Mars, you could look at the images and decode the messages. It was a sort of a contest.

First to land was Spirit, and the picture of its DVD message is here:
https://planetary.org/redrover-dvd/dvd_spirit.html

Then came Opportunity, and its DVD picture is here:
https://planetary.org/redrover-dvd/dvd_opportunity.html

The two codes are wildly different. For some reason, Spirit's cypher is considerably more complex. The contest was designed for children, but I found the Spirit code to be a good challenge [before the clues were released]. It took me about three hours of work to unravel it. The Opportunity code was very simple, and only took about five minutes to solve.

I'll forego an in-depth description of the encoding systems used until they release the answers. So more on this later.

I just finished playing Ico for the PS2. I first played this game at Lukas' place in Atlanta when I was passing through on the way out to Los Alamos. I only played a few hours of it and hadn't gotten very far, so when I learned that my friend Sy had a copy here in town, I got him to lend it to me and over the course of this weekend I finished it off.

I've been told it's sort of like Prince of Persia, only with really great sound design and terrible AI on the part of "Yorda" aka mental defect girlfriend. I enjoy these puzzle games a lot, but I wish they would make the puzzle-solving a bit more complicated. The trouble with games like Ico is that there are only a few possible actions you can take. So when there's a problem to be solved, it either involves pulling one of a myriad of identical switches, climbing small ledges, pushing one of the many cubical boxes, or cutting a rope.

The variety of actions availble is lacking, and therefore the puzzles can't get very complex. The game designer's answer to this problem is to just make the {switch|box|rope|ledge} harder to find or farther away, but it hasn't really increased the intellectual involvement of the puzzle.

I'd like to see this game or one like it done where not every switch does something important, where there is more to solving puzzles than finding the mechanisms, and where Yorda can climb down a damn ladder without me saying "bon soir" ad nauseum.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed playing this game. But unfortunately it wasn't because the puzzles were challenging. The game reminds me a lot of Myst, where the art direction and sound design are what really sells it.

Next up for the PS2 is Prince of Persia, which I've also only played for a little bit.

On Saturday, Nina and I went to watch the Bruins play the Lightning at Rob's place. Rob is a huge Lightning fan, so we went as the Boston fans. We didn't have any Bruins gear to wear, so we cut big yellow B's out of origami paper and taped them to our shirts. It was a good high-scoring game, with the Bruins winning in the end 5-4.

Afterwards, Nina and I headed down to the Overlook in Whiterock for some rock climbing. This was Nina's first try with outdoor climbing and she did well. I managed to get up a couple routes that were too much for me the last time I climbed there. It was a gorgeous day.

Today, we went down to Espanola for the monthly Zia Spacemodelers launch. Drew had his new 4" diameter, 8' long Black Brant scale model built and he launched it on an I366 Redline. Great flight and a huge crowd. Really nice warm weather again, though a bit windy for rockets. Some pictures from the launch are available here.

On the way back from the airport yesterday, Nina stopped off at an international grocery store in Albuquerque and bought their entire stock of Patak's Vindaloo Curry Paste. This stuff is amazing. It makes cooking a vindaloo so easy. It's embarrassing how badly I did when I tried to cook vindaloos from scratch. I documented the process here:

http://mouser.org/projects/cooking/vindaloo/

I hope to do some more of these online recipes; hopefully it'll inspire me to cook more and to try new recipies. I feel like my food experience lately has been rather monotonous.

The spring daylight savings switch is quickly approaching, and that means the start of Ultimate Frisbee season here in Los Alamos. Because of my thesis work I haven't been getting much exercise at all this winter and I'm way out of shape.

I started running again today to get my lungs back. I only did one lap of the street loop on the mesa I live on, my guess is that it was about half a mile. But hopefully if I keep doing it I can get myself up to a few miles in a few weeks. We'll see.

This will all be made much easier if the weather continues to be amazing. We had seventy degrees in town today.

X Division had an all-hands meeting today. The new division leader was giving a talk about his views of the future of the division and how he sees us fitting into the lab as a whole, etc. The talk was, for the most part, full of standard Dilbertian drivel that was exceedingly dull. At one point, he put up a draft of the X Division "Vision Statement" [puke] that they were working on. Note: As the general staff of X Division labors on to develop cutting edge computational physics packages with direct impact on the strategic security of our nation, the management appears to have retreats wherein they come up with unfinished "Mission Statements." It must have something to do with adding value or being goal-oriented. I don't know.

Anyway, so after showing us this vision statement, he went through it word for word and talked about how each word in the statement was important. I kid you not, the first word was "The" and he had a bullet for "The" that talked about the significane of the word in the statement. He talked about it for two minutes.

I never ever ever ever want to be a manager. These people stop doing science so that they can manage people who are still doing the real work. Management just seems so unbearably bland! The giant salary must be to keep them from being overcome with ennui. Wait, on second thought, maybe I will be a manager.

So when I was at Y-12, I was hanging out with a group of people who's official job titles were "Process Engineers." It's their job to design the processes by which the factory creates whatever it is they are building.

On the wall outside of one office was a organizational chart distributed by BWXT, the company that manages Y-12. It listed all the senior management and how the organization tree was layed out, who had power of whom, etc.

Beneath the chart was a ribbon that went down a few feet to an index card reading "Process Engineers." Just above the card someone had placed a post-it note that read "Whale Feces."

Recently Cowering has been releasing updated versions of his GoodDATs, bumping each DAT up to a seemingly arbitrarily chosen version 2.01. French fileserver playagain.net has dutifully been providing me with the updated ROM sets which I spent awhile this evening integrating into my arcade server.

Right now I've got the arcade control panel hooked up to the TV along with the arcade server, so when I want to I can play games on our fancy-pants 32" TV. It's pretty nice, but I still want to build the arcade cabinet. I have a feeling that will be a present to myself for finishing my thesis, and that's still a long way off.

I can't think of a good Ides of March joke... Perhaps there is no such animal.

Anyway, I did more work on the GroganBuster tonight. I got the bulkheads all drilled out and the igniter binding posts installed. I still need to solder the leads to the binding posts, then I can epoxy the aft bulkhead assembley into the electronics module. Once that's done, the rocket will be ready to paint. I'm hoping to get that much done this weekend so that Drew and I can possibly get some work done on it after this Sunday's launch. It's going to look awesome.

Happy Pi Day!

Back in the summer of 1999, I went to Sweden as part of a month-long trip galavanting around Europe. While there, I visited a woman named Johanna and we had our picture taken in the bell tower of the building where the Nobel Prizes are given out. That picture is here: mouser_johanna.jpg

Last month I got an email from a guy who paints pictures of photographs he finds on the web. He wanted my permission to paint a rendition of that photograph. Now I don't know why he chose that particular picture, but check this out: Immortallized in paint

For some reason, I feel like I should be holding a pitchfork in that picture...

Anyway, Nina's away at a conference in Houston for the week, so I'm taking this opportunity to catch up on a bunch of hobbies. I did a considerable amount of work on my latest and greatest rocket, the 7'8" tall GroganBuster. Most of the bodywork is done; the last of the epoxy layups on the booster section is curing right now. When everything is dry in the morning, the only thing left will be attaching the forward bridle mount to the nosecone and finishing the payload section. It's almost ready to get painted.

I took a really cute picture of Soleil Fou sitting in the sink.

The lame part about working within the nuclear weapons complex is that I will never be able to talk about my work with my friends, family, and certainly not here. So.... my trip to Y-12 was.... interesting. I did stuff, things happened, and I learned a lot. And we all gave 110%.

I managed to look pathetic enough going out to eat by myself on Thursday night that the wait staff invited me to come hang out with them at some Knoxville bar. There's nothing quite as exciting as haning out in a bar with people who are all talking about their mutual friends who you don't know and will never meet. Wh00t.

The one thing I did that was both interesting and not classified was a visit to Lost Sea Cave in Sweetwater, TN. It hosts the largest underground lake in America. And it is definitely big. The lake's surface area is quoted as four acres. You hike through the cave for about 400m to get to the lake, then get in this glass-bottom boat and tool around in the lake for awhile, looking at the rainbow trout that they've stocked it with. I've got some pictures of the fish; I'll post them as soon as I can.

So this morning I'm heading out to the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, TN for.... work stuff. I've been there once before a couple of months ago. When I went last time, I was stuck without my own rental car and I had to go wherever Paul wanted to go which was sort of a drag.

This time, I have my own rental car and can fill my free time doing whatever I want. For starters, I'm going to go back to the coin shop Paul and I went to and this time I'll have my list of needed coins with me. I'm also going to to Calhoun's BBQ, which was awesome. If I have enough time, I'll visit one of the numerous commercial caves in the area.

I wish I could take a few extra days there and just do some wild caving, as the area is repleat with caves. But I'm on the company dime and they frown on travel extensions.

Anyway, time for a breakfast burritto and then it's off to the Los Alamos airport to pick up my rental car. Drive Joe and I down to the Albuquerque airport, fly to Atlanta, then to Knoxville. I can't for the life of me remember any songs by the Oak Ridge Boys...

I took it easy this weekend. After cleaning up from the massive party I didn't do much of anything aside from try to revive a dead battery in my Subaru, read Tom Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon," and play Total Carnage with my arcade controller.

As I was loafing about, I happened to notice that there were two very large male mule deer in my backyard. They were just hanging out and eating some grass where the snow had thawed away under a tree. The weather was extremely warm this weekend (upper 50s), so I put the telephoto lens on my camera and went out on the upstairs deck to take some pictures of them. One of them was behind a piece of fence and the other was behind a rock, but I did the best I could.

I also got some shots of the birds that frequent the feeders in the backyard. Mostly we get Oregon juncos and dark-eyed "grey-headed" juncos (Junco hyemalis), but there was also a mountain chickadee (Parus gambeli) in there.

[picture links soon]

It's odd, at the old house the bird inventory was totally different. We got mostly house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) and grosbeaks (Pheucticus melanocephalus). Although we're less than a mile from the old place and at approximately the same elevation, we get completely different birds. Perhaps they are rather territorial of their feeders. There are so many juncos that perhaps they scare away other birds...

I'm in the process of porting all my old journals over to this Movable Type setup. It's a long process; there are hundreds of entries. I've tried to keep various journals from time to time in various formats, finally I'm going to concatinate them all. But as of right now I'm only back to February of 2001. The period from April of 1998 to July of 1999 I basically wrote an entry every day, so I've got a long way to go. Stay tuned.

Richard threw an enormous beer party at our apartment last night. He didn't put Nina or I on the invite email, so we didn't know about it until a couple of days ago. He mentioned to me that he was going to have "German night" at our house, but I figured that meant that he would make some saurkraut or something for a few guests. Anyway, Nina got clued in that this might be something more than a dinner party when she got invited to the party by an acquaintance at work who had heard from someone she didn't know.

It ended up with over 60 people crammed into our living room, the back deck, the hot tub, and my bedroom. It was far too many people. Apparently the email said "bring beer or sausage" and no one brought sausage. So this morning when we went down to survey the damage, there were six packs of beer bottles everywhere. I think I counted over 400 empty bottles and 75 unopened ones.

Having a party is a great way to stock your house with beer if you need to do so. It's a shame I don't drink beer, because there is a metric buttload of it here now. There's also a good quantity of it on the floor. I hope Richard plans to mop.

In late 2002 I agreed to join Robin Blume-Kohout's expedition to Denali, which at the time was tentatively planned for this coming June. During the course of our training we came to terms with the fact that we wouldn't be ready by June, 2004, so we put it off a year.

Now Robin has accepted a post-doc position in California that is starting in January of 2005. We've been rather slack on our training, and the rest of the team already lives in California. My guess is that Robin's moving away is going to lead to either the slipping of the time schedule another year (or more) or to my being politely excused from the team.

With the entire team in California except me, it will be exceedingly difficult to do any group training. My guess is that I'll have to form my own expedition some time down the road. Denali is most-likely going to the back burner for awhile. But I still intend to summit its 20,320' peak.

"What have we here? The police appear to have themselves and RV!" - Die Hard

The New Mexico State Police recently upgraded their helicopter. The new model, an Agusta 109, can hold eight people, has a cruising speed fully loaded of 160mph, and generally kicks ass. Here's a picture of the actual bird in flight [the picture caption says November 2000, but they only just bought it and that's definitely the new one].

The NMSP use their helicopter for two things. The first is to transport the Governor around, hence the all-leather interior [not kidding]. The second is to assist in search & rescue missions. For this reason, we took our team down to the hangar last night and had an orientation meeting with one of the pilots. He walked us around the bird and demonstrated some of the basic features. We had a long talk about safety hazards when dealing with helicopters and what sort of space he needed us to make ready in the field for a landing zone.

Unlike the late Angel 1 [clipped a hanger door and was destroyed earlier this year], 606 is not equipped to carry a litter. Its primary role for search & rescue will be as a spotter. And to that end, the pilot needs a second person onboard to handle the observing duties. His job is to keep the helicopter on course and out of the trees. The observer does all the actual searching.

As members of a certified NM search & rescue team, we will have the opportunity to ride in 606 as spotters should the need arise at a future search. Although this is usually a busy time for the team, we haven't had a search in a couple months. And that's a good thing. But the team sure is itching to get out and try out some of our new gear and maybe some of us will get to ride in 606.

The thing about the public school system in big cities is that it is a mess. I had a social studies class in highschool wherein we watched movies about 80% of the time. Movies like Rambo. The teacher next door called him Mr. Movies.

My algebra teacher kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk and was often drunk in class. Despite being pretty handy with the mathematics, I still have this odd hole in my algebra knowledge that irritates me. It most embarrassingly reared its ugly head while I was taking my doctoral qualifying exams at MIT and I found myself having to re-derive the quadratic formula. That's the sort of thing I should just know.

The students at my highschool were no better. We would have an average of three of so fire alarms per week, which was especially aggrivating when I was in my lifeguarding class during a pleasant Minnesota February. We were allowed to take our towel with us when we left the building...

However, just as there was the occasional student who was actually there to learn, there were also some teachers who were interested in teaching. One such teacher was Betty Richardson, who taught English.

Now you must understand that English is not my subject. I never really enjoyed being forced to read the classics, most of which I found rather tiresome. Luckily, English classes are often graded very subjectively. And being an excellent bullshitter and a quick talker, I was generally able to do very well in English classes and not do any of the reading.

Richardson was the first teacher who ever got me interested in the subject matter to the point of actually wanting to read the books. And to read supplemental material that wasn't required. She opened my eyes to Throeau, and to the power of philosphy.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that she didn't approach the curricculum as something to be marched through from beginning to end. She didn't deliver the contents of the syllabus - she saw it as her job to deliver inspiration to her students until they desired to walk the path of the syllabus on their own.

I remember she had a little clay troll on her desk holding a small flag that said something like "no whining." She was very protective of her troll. I saw it as my duty to kidnap the troll for a period of one week. I managed to get it back onto her desk without her noticing and for the rest of the term she would watch it through the corner of her eye and make occasional comments as to the great troll ordeal. For my final presentation, I had a slideshow to accompany my talk [real analog slides - this was pre-powerpoint]. During the talk, I would occasionally quickly skip past a slide or two that would only be on the screen for a moment, but if you got a good look at them you'd see the troll sitting in a microwave, or in a frying pan, or on a small raft in a lake. By this time Betty and I had become friends and she appreciated the joke.

I got an A in Betty Richardson's English class, as I generally did in all English classes, but when it was over I felt I had earned my grade for the first time - and that I'd truly gotten something out of the class. I came away from high school very jaded with "the system" but Richardson and a scarce handfull of others stood out as beacons of integrity and enthusiasm in a sea of apathy.

I still keep a copy of the complete works of Thoreau in my truck for occasional contemplation while camping.

Betty Richardson was killed on Monday when a driver going the wrong way on the highway collided with her car.