So as of last night, I have a new roommie! Richard has been moving out and Mikki moving in, and last night they both got to the point of actually staying in their new places.

Also today is Mikki's birthday so I made her a special bday breakfast.

OK, I left Los Alamos Thursday night and drove up to Colorado for some mountain climbing. Almost died Friday... here are the trip reports:

Mt. Elbert and Grays & Torreys.

On the way home there was a lot of really photogenic weather. I didn't get a chance to photograph much of it, but I finally did stop to catch this sunset and then make a first stab at lightning photography. The lightning shots didn't really work because the full moon was only 10 degrees away in the sky. It was illuminating the thunderhead and making long exposures impossible. In order to get the lightning to show up against the clouds, I had to use really short exposures and the odds of me catching a bolt dropped to basically nothing.

One interesting note: If the moon had been about 1/4 day behind in its cycle, it would have risen 10 minutes earlier and the result would have been fantastic. In this picture you can see the thunderhead before the sun had set. The shadow of the Earth quickly moved up this cloud until just the very top bit was bright pink. About 30 seconds after the last bit of color had faded, the full moon rose right up above the center of it. It was really spectacular, but would have been infinitely better had the moon risen while the cloud was still illuminated by the sun. Ten minutes would have made all the difference.

I'm migrating my web content over to a new hosting provider, and this is just a test to see if the MovableType database and scripts are up and running. If you're seeing this message, then you're reading this from the new location!

While reading up on techniques for lightning photography, I became aware of a broader range of atmospheric optical phenomena - all of which are interesting to photograph. This site has a good thorough overview of what's out there to see, and some amazing pictures. Check out the ice halos in this fish-eye shot from the south pole. Geometry is magnificent.

New Mexico has amazing sunsets, cloud displays, and clear views of the stars on a regular basis. Hopefully I'll be able to get good pictures of some of these atmospheric optical beauties. Unfortunately, the monsoon season is drawing to a close which means there won't be much lightning around here for about 9 months, and it is so dry here that cirrus clouds just aren't too common.

I just spent a few hours out at the overlook with my camera experimenting with long exposure photography. I'd like to start trying to photograph some of the lightning storms we have around here, and before I can do that I need to figure out the idiosyncracies of my camera under low light conditions. Take a look and tell me what you think.

I received my first copy of the Planetary Society's newsletter indicating that they have indeed given me my complimentary membership for being one of the first people to solve the encoded message on MER-A. They posted the list of winners here.

If only I hadn't gone to lunch in the middle of my code-breaking work, I'd have been faster than #8. Also, I was out of town when they released the MER-B cypher. It was much more simple, and only took me a few minutes to solve. I probably would have been competitive there as well. Oh well. :)

I haven't receieved my Lego prize yet, but I suspect it is one of their $70 models of the Mars rovers. I'm excited.

I've been thinking about climbing Pajarito Mountain since I first came to Los Alamos in 1999. I finally got around to it this morning. It's the mountain which looms over Los Alamos, and the northern slopes of it comprise the Los Alamos Ski Hill. I hiked up 1,400' of the radio tower maintenance road to the summit and took some pictures.

I've recently gotten frustrated with the lack of selection at the local movie rental places. Having discovered that their inventory has very little that I am inspired to rent and haven't yet seen, I bit the bullet and signed up for Netflix. My first movies arrived today and I just watched the very first one, Errol Morris' Fog of War.

For starters, let me say that I wholly recommend watching this documentary. I have not watched a more thought-provoking movie in some time - perhaps ever. I found the film engaging on many topics and many levels. There are numerous reasons that I like this film and I will only discuss a few here.

The documentary focuses on the Vietnam war and McNamara's involvement and responsibility for it. To date, the picture that has been painted in my mind by various history classes, books, and conversations has led me to believe something wholly inaccurate about Robert McNamara. I came away from the film with an enormous respect for McNamara as a person and for his political achievements.

Along those lines, I had always believed that McNamara was a hawk that had been one of the principal architects of the Vietnam war. His interview in this film, backed up by audio tapes of conversations between McNamara, Kennedy, and Johnson, demonstrate that this is incorrect. In fact, the footage seems to demonstrate that it was Johnson that brought the war on. Beyond just the Texas accent, I found a lot of very disturbing similarities between Johnson's war-time rhetoric and that of our current administration. The historical parallels are creepy.

I see the eleven lessons learned from McNamara's life being lost entirely on our current body politic. Whereas Farenheit 9/11 was a get-out-the-vote tool for the democratic low-brow, I see Fog of War as carrying a much more effective message along the same lines - albeit considerably more subtle. He truly understands how personal politics, human fallibility, and lack of understanding led to an un-winnable war. The american leadership could learn a lot from these lessons, as could the american people.

Above and beyond historical parallels to Vietnam, the aspect of the movie that made me think the most was something that was only covered briefly at the beginning of the film - the capacity for human beings to make mistakes and the rammifications of this on nuclear capability. This is naturally of interest to me because of my currently employment.

McNamara gave me some new perspective on issues that I place a great amount of weight on. I'm writing this just after watching the film and haven't had enough time to really think about what it all means to me personally. The purpose of me writing this isn't to tell you what amazing new conclusions I've come to; just to illustrate that the movie is powerful and I think you should see it - whoever you are.

Working in a sensitive government position, I can be expected to be asked to undergo a polygraph examination. There's a lot of talk of "fooling the lie detector" and speculation of whether or not it is accurate. I'd just like to demonstrate something statistically interesting.

For the time being, let's be generous to the polygraph and say that the probability of it correctly detecting a lie is 99% and that the rate of false positives is only 1%. This conditional probability can be written as:

P(+|L) = 0.99
P(+|T) = 0.01

Where the symbol P(a|b) indicates the probabilty of result 'a' for the subset of all cases for which 'b' is true. I'm using '+' to indicate a positive result of the polygraph, indicating that I'm lying. 'L' indicates that I am actually lying, and 'T' indicates that I am actually telling the truth. So P(+|L) = 0.99 means that there is a 99% chance that if I'm lying, the lie detector will give a positive result.

Now, let's make an assumption that is rather hostile to me - that I lie one-tenth of a percent of the time.

P(L) = 0.001
P(T) = 0.999 because P(L) + P(T) = 1

Now we apply Bayes' theorem, which states that

P(a|b)P(b) = P(b|a)P(a)

or, for our purposes, P(T|+)P(+) = P(+|T)P(T). This can be solved for P(T|+) to give:

P(T|+) = P(+|T)P(T)/P(+)

Now, to calculate P(+) we can simply make the argument that the machine will give positive results sometimes when I'm telling the truth, and sometimes when I'm lying. And the sum of those two will be the total probability of the maching giving a positive result. This can be written as:

P(+) = P(+|T)P(T) + P(+|L)P(L)

Now we have numbers for everything on the right-hand side of this equation. Plugging in our assumptions, above, we get that

P(+) = 0.01098

This is the overall probability that the lie detector will indicate that I'm lying. Now, plug this into the above equation for P(T|+) and plug our numeric assumptions into the remaining terms on the right-hand side to reveal

P(T|+) = 0.909836

The meaning of this statement is that, when the polygraph indicates I am lying, there is a 91% probability that I am actually telling the truth. Bear in mind that this result was achieved using assumptions about my lying and the accuracy of the polygraph that are extremely favorable to the polygraph examiner and hostile to me. If you assume that I lie less than 0.1% of the time and/or that the polygraph does not catch 99% of lies and/or that the polygraph has a higher than 1% false-positive rate, the P(T|+) probability goes up - quickly. For numbers that I think are more accurate, the probability of my telling the truth when they say I'm lying is more like 99.9999%.

Polygraph examiners use the results of the polygraph machine as an intimidation device - saying things like "The machine indicates that you are being dishonest. Why might that be?" My response will be:

"The machine you are using is not up to the task."

Well my monster peak-baggin extravaganza turned out to fizzle, kind of. I drove up to Kite Late on Thursday night, spent a very cold night in the truck, and climbed the Lincoln group on Friday morning. See the link above for a trip report and photos.

That afternoon, I hung out in Breckinridge for awhile and then headed over to my next mountainous target - the Evans group. Unfortunately, the Guanella Pass road was closed for construction so I couldn't get anywhere near it. Instead, I drove over to the mountains I was going to climb on Sunday - the Grays group. I spent the night at the trailhead only to wake up in the morning to a huge thunderstorm.

I was getting bummed out about my lack of success, and decided not to wait out the storm and just drove home, instead. I spent the weekend cleaning the house and watching movies.

Well Nina made it out the door with her mom at 12:30pm on Sunday. I've been on my own since. I'm trying not to focus on the fact that she is gone, and instead focus on the increased amounts of free time that I have now. I've made a pledge to myself that if I am awake and not at work, I will be doing something to fill my time.

Tonight I had Christina, Karin, Mikki, and Jeff (Geoff?) over for dinner. Christina's husband Mike is out of town on business, so we decided that we would cook dinner together. We made a fancy baked mac & cheese that had onion and sausage in it. It was very good. We also played lots of video games on the arcade panel. Simpsons figured prominently, as did "Magic Cat Adventure." The game "Mahjong Erotica Golf" was voted funniest name, but we didn't play it because it's in Japanese.

This weekend I was going to go climb the Wilson group of Colorado 14ers, which are supposedly quite challenging. However, it turns out that Robin can't go and he wants to try to do them in two weeks. So I'm going to go climbing on my own somewhere else.

Because I'll be solo, I'm going to bag a bunch of easy 14ers just to tick them off the list. It's something to do. Taking advantage of my extra time to drive, I think I'll go nab some of the easy yet far away front-range peaks up near Denver. Grays/Torreys actually has a 3rd/4th class route on it, and Evans/Bierstadt has a 3rd class route. I may throw in Democrat/Cameron/Lincoln/Bross as a bonus if I'm feeling particularly peak-bagger-esque.

In calculating the drive time for my trip using Yahoo Maps, I discovered that my apartment is almost at the exact geographic center of Los Alamos, which means if you just enter "Los Alamos, NM" as your address for your starting point, it gives you directions that actually start at my place on Orange St. - convenient!

I collected up the spare change that's been sitting around my house forever and brought it to the bank yesterday.

$174.68

OK, so Nina, Robin, and I successfully climbed Kit Carson and Challenger Point this weekend. The writeup for that and a link to the photos can be found here.

The guys I used to work with back in Minneapolis who have hosted mouser.org for me for the last several years are calling it quits and shutting down their server. So mouser.org will be moving, and there will probably be an interruption in service. My advice is that you print out two or three hundred pages of mouser.org content and just keep them in hard copy for use during this mouser.org blackout. Fear not, the site will come back up in some form or other.

Nina is leaving for a cross-country road trip on Sunday. After she gets to Boston, she'll fly to Iceland for fun and excitement and lousy weather. Then she's off to grad school in Connecticut. :(

Molvig is deeply concerned about the work stand-down at the lab and has pushed back my graduation date to May, 2005 as a result. This isn't as bad as it sounds... Once I finish my work, I can get the department to write a letter to the lab indicating that I have finished all my academic requirements and am just waiting to actually receive the diploma and the lab will then be able to consider me for employment. With luck, this means I'll still get hired this fall and get the real TSM salary, etc.