I was thinking of writing a piece of software to help me hone my blackjack ability, sort of a card counting trainer program. Luckily, I searched on freshmeat first and found that someone had already done so. This led me to the OpenBlackjack website. Aside from including a piece of software that is very similar to what I had in mind to write, it also has some insightful articles that demonstrate that the people responsible for OpenBlackjack are both very funny and extremely good with statistics. The top entry in the News & Articles section includes the following scathing overview of a "crockery bullshit" blackjack article found at gamblingmagazine.com:

Have you ever been on a losing run at blackjack? Do you find that the dealer sometimes draws out to 21 on you? If so, you might have previously blamed your bad luck on mathematical phenomena such as "chance" and "variance". I was once like you, that is until I read this article.

I now know that my losing streaks have been caused by HOT dealers. Apparently, any table where the player wins less than 50% of the hands has a HOT dealer behind the felt. You should leave the table immediately and find a COLD dealer. "or at least neutral"...

How do you find those COLD dealers? According to the article, look at past performance; A dealer that is HOT will stay hot. You see, much like a coin flip and other random games of chance, blackjack outcomes can be predicted based on the past. For instance, suppose you flip a coin and it comes up heads. That coin is what we statisticians like to refer to as "heads-hot". It will be more likely to land on heads. Until you change tables.

Ever since they upgraded the volcano alert for Mt. St. Helens this morning to "Level 2," I've been religiously watching the Mt. St. Helens Volcanocam.

Naturally, I was disturbed when I saw this:

And all this time the people of that area thought that pyroclastic flow was thier greatest concern...

I have recently found myself on the top of Redondo Peak. If you want to know more about that trip, ask. I'm going to California for the Nuclear Explosives Design Physics Conference next week, and then Nina is coming to visit a week after that. The following weekend I'm going back to the Chupadera region for some cave digging. In short, I don't have any free weekends for some time and therefore I won't be climbing mountains until probably November. This means that my next few climbs are likely to be real winter ascents and markedly different from my climbs of late.

I climbed Culebra Peak, my 13th Colorado fourteener, last Thursday. Trip report is here, photos are here.

Roommate #2, Robin, returned last night from dropping his wife off in California. This was complete with tales of his trailer falling off his truck, man-eating sherriffs, and exploding heads. So from now until January, there are three of us in the condo again.

The impending Hurricane Javier remnants totally disappeared over the last two days. Though we got a long day of rain yesterday, there is no storm to now impede my climb of Culebra on Thursday. This is because I scored much better in Fantasy Hurricane. It works like this: if you come in last, hurricanes ruin your climbing trips.

I spent the morning down at the orienteering meet helping out for National Orienteering Day [I'm sure you all took the day off to go orienteering, right?]. I didn't run because my leg still hurts from falling into a cactus yesterday while vetting the red course. However, inbetween getting people's start times and finish times, I was keeping my eye on some thin whispy cirrus clouds that had moved in. I know that they are the ones that sometimes reveal fancy atmospheric optical phenomena.

And around noon I got to see my first 22-degree solar halo! Came out great with my DSLR, which I happened to have in the truck. As a bonus, a plane flew over the top of the clouds and its contrail left a great shadow. I put these pictures along with all of my recent shots of the sky together into a new album here.

So maybe in response to my running the Fantasy Hurricane League I am now facing a distinct possibility that the eastern-Pacific hurricane Javier will be coming through the southwest during the middle of next week. It won't surprise me at all to find it barrelling through Colorado on Thursday just as I am trying to summit Culebra.

This afternoon I received an email from the county highpointers list that indicated a private trip was being arranged to climb Culebra Peak and Red Mountain, a Colorado fourteener and centennial thirteener. They had 20 positions available for a day hike next week and I managed to nab one. In the past two years I'm not aware of another trip being allowed onto these [private] peaks, so I took the opportunity. It is on a Thursady so I'll have to use a vacation day to climb it... but I figure it's worth it. The [wanker] landowner is making us pay a hefty sum to climb, but again, I'm willing to pay it.

Some time ago I took CPR and AED training here at the lab and brought to the attention of my group that we should have AEDs in our office spaces. Well it is finally happening. And in recognition of my contribution to the safety of our group, they gave me a $75 gift certificate to a mall in Santa Fe. Cool!

Today I forewent climbing mountains to instead climb rocks. I finally went to the El Rito sport climbing area in northern New Mexico. James and Mark and I drove up this morning, having breakfast in Espanola at Angelina's along the way. We spent the whole day climbing, leaving the rocks at about 5:00pm.

The rock at El Rito is really odd conglomerate that is surprisingly solid and fun to climb. Mark is a really good climber (top ropes 5.12) and James, while not that good is still much better than me, so they set a lot of climbs that were very difficult for me. I haven't been climbing in about three months, so I was off from my usual 5.9 ability. We climbed a 5.9, a 5.10a, and a 5.8+ and I managed to not complete any of them, though I was only one move from the top on the first one. Despite my lack of finishing any routes, I still had a good day and kicked my own ass rather thoroughly. I'll have to hit the climbing wall in the gym a bit and then head back up to El Rito and show it who's boss.

"The solar wind appears to be made of dirt, not unlike that found in northwestern Utah..."

Ugh. Just watched the Genesis spacecraft totally crater, live on NASA TV. Bad day for space science.

He never should have told anyone that he had put himself on HotOrNot? Can't seem to find out what his rating is, though...

I told Robin I'd help him move stuff from his house on Saturday, so I was planning on a day trip of hiking somewhere for Sunday. However, it rained all day Saturday - the weather was absolutely abysmal. And when it hadn't cleared up by midnight, I didn't set an alarm and just slept in.

Of course, the weather was flawless Sunday. But I wasted most of the morning sleeping. And then I was all excited about the new furniture that I had acquired from Robin and ended up rearranging the living room all day long.

Christina had her Labor Day Barbeque on Monday right in the middle of the day, so no real day trips were possible there, either. Other than the bocci tournament at Christina's place and hauling 100-pound pieces of furniture around, I didn't really get any exercise at all this weekend.

The barbeque was awesome though. I lost bigtime at the bocci tournament - the championship game ended up being between two people that had never played before. Mike and I, the self-proclaimed favorites, declared that this bad showing was on account of the freshly-watered lawn and its propensity for huge soggy divits. The yard looked like the surface of a golf ball by the time we were done with the tourney. Anyway, trying to roll a ball across the divits resulted in ambiguously bad results. So random shots in the dark ended up being a better strategy than finely-honed bocci skill.

Or something...

So I now have in my posession both of the Mars-related Lego kits. Specifically, the Mars Rover kit and the Mission to Mars kit. The latter is composed of three main components: a model of the Mars Odyssey satellite, a small model of the MER, and and a Delta II ELV and associated launch tower. The satellite model is so simple that it is somewhat worthless... without the stickers for the solar panels and base plate, it probably wouldn't be recognizeable. The small rover is cute... it has working suspension, though not authentic MER rocker-bogey style. The Delta rocket is probably the best part of the kit. It looks pretty good aside from its 8 boosters instead of 9, and the strange gap in the body tube near the fuel hose.

The Rover kit is more of a Technics kit than an attempt at a scale model. It was designed to have a lot of interactive moving parts to play with. However, these come at the expense of realism. For instance, the rocker-bogey is missing again so that they could include steering. The sensor mast is far too short for the scale of the model. When you fold up the (translucent??) solar panels, the model looks very wrong. I had to add several extra rubberbands to the joints to get the solar panels to unfold automatically as they were designed to do.

All this bitching aside, however, the Mars Rover is a technical masterpiece. The moving parts are really ingeneous and it incorporates a lot of functionality into a relatively small frame. In the end, even if it doesn't really look exactly like a MER, it still looks pretty sweet on my desk at work and all my co-workers want to play with it.

So my thanks to the Planetary Society for the Legos.

So last weekend was my last 9-80 schedule 3-day weekend. I feel like I took advantage of them pretty well. This weekend is a regular weekend but there is a holiday next Monday, so now I have another trip to plan. However, this weekend is tainted by the ongoing roommate shuffle.

Mikkis is basically fully moved in, but Richard's crap is still mostly here. Robin is moving out of his place and (temporarily) into my climbing wall on the 10th and will probably want to do some of that this weekend. So I may just take a day trip sometime this weekend and spent the rest of it helping people move. We'll see.

At this point, my content has all been migrated over to the new server and everything should be up & running. I haven't updated the main page yet because I want to put up something new and haven't had time. But the content should all be functioning properly now. Let me know if you find errors.