Well, we sat around tonight watching movies and handing candy out to kids. The only problem was that we only had three groups come to our door. A total of seven kids, two of which were our neighbor's kids. Does our house seem scary or something? This is even worse than last year, when we only got seven groups with a total of 12 kids.

Anyway, lots of candy left over for me. 100 Grand bars are the best candy bars in existance.

In other news, today was the cooking club's bi-monthly get together at Dana and Andrew's place. The theme was "soup." I made Mouser-Style Chili. Someone made an excellent borscht, there was a curry chicken soup thing that was really tasty, a spicy pumpkin soup thing, and a variety of other great soups. Somehow a meal that consisted of only soups was still very very filling. It was like soup tapas.

Then, when I got home, I found that Mikki had decided to make about ten liters of potato soup for dinner. It was great as well, but we have a ton of leftovers now. It's going to be a soup leftovers lunch week.

Another CD I have that is not in the CDDB:

Simply Red, Fairground single, from their 1995 albumn "Life."

CDDB seems to be a little weak on their CD singles. They definitely carry entries for singles, because I have several that it recognized no problem. But so far all three misses have been for singles. Anyone know how I go about submitting records to the CDDB for these?

I am a scientist.

I am a scientist specifically because I value an objective view of the universe and I like understanding how things work. Science, by collecting observational evidence and conducting experiments, arrives at an objective description of reality. It describes the world as it is, rather than as we might want it to be. It is self-checking and self-policing; these built-in error-correcting mechanisms prevent personal bias from affecting our understanding.

The self-refereed nature of science also prevents it from straying into regimes for which there are insufficient observational resources to form a tentative conclusion. Scientists are free to hypothesize, but the value of science lies in the fact that the theories of the scientific canon fit all of the presently available data.

In a world of limited information and limited perceptual capability, the scientific canon is the current best estimate at a description of physical reality. To dispute the scientific canon without offering a reproducible counterexample is to diverge from reality.

I am not a politician.

I will never be a politician for many reasons. Most importantly, the art of governance requires making decisions based entirely on personal bias. Politicians are forced to deal with conflicting values, compromise, and negotiation. Often the government is required to take a stand on an issue for which there is no objective view. They are therefore guaranteed of a subjective result, and the ramifications of that result are projected onto a populace, many of whom will not share the government’s subjective view. Of course I have no solution to this problem, but the idea of making such decisions leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

There is an intersection, however, between government and science. Often the issues confronting the government are not merely sociological but are also driven by physical or even mathematical concerns. Consider House Bill #246 of the Indiana State Legislature, which (among other amazing feats) mandated the value of Pi! In fact, the bill implied four different values for Pi, all of which were incorrect (one as high as 9.24!!).

Obviously, this is an extreme case, but it illustrates two things. First, it shows us that there are cases in which the rule of law can intrude upon the turf of science. Second, it demonstrates rather dramatically that contradicting science can be foolish.

The President of the United States has a science advisor for exactly this reason. His or her job is to keep the president informed of scientific intersections with current policy, and abreast of the facts related to the issues at hand. The president is then required to work within the confines of these facts and proceed through the grey areas of executing public policy.

Perhaps using the word “required” is going a bit far. The president would be strongly advised to face the scientific facts that relate to any given issue when making decisions. Unfortunately, these facts may lead to conclusions that are not in line with the stated position of the administration, and furthermore may clearly illustrate mistakes made by the administration.

The scientific thing to do in such a situation would be to update your position to reflect the facts. It’s called revision and it happens all the time in science. New evidence is made available, a theory is contradicted and therefore rescinded. New hypotheses are made, experiments undertaken, and eventually new theories are developed that fit within the confines of the evidence at hand.

A classic example is Newton’s laws of motion. Scientists were so confident in this theory that they had gotten into the habit of referring to it as a “law.” The theory stood for centuries until the dawn of quantum mechanics, when people began to find experimental results that seemed to violate Newton’s laws. A major paradigm shift was required to incorporate quantum mechanics into modern science. I consider the incorporation of quantum mechanics into the scientific canon to be one of the crowning achievements of modern science. It showed an incredible ability to overcome personal intuition and bias, as well as admitting that it was incomplete and not wholly accurate.

Now, let’s turn to an examination of the current president of the United States and his administration. George W. Bush has had to make a lot of decisions on politically charged topics for which there are considerable scientific intersections. Notable examples include stem cell research, environmental protection, and reproductive health. Throughout his four years as president, Bush’s policy decisions have never strayed from his religiously motivated ideology, even in the face of contradictory scientific evidence. Here is a poignant example:

Last December, a panel of 28 non-partisan medical experts was assembled to make a recommendation to the FDA about the medical safety of a drug. They declared unanimously that a drug was medically safe for over-the-counter sales. Normally, the FDA would then immediately approve it for use in the general public. However, after pressure from the White House, the FDA declined to approve the drug, citing inadequate data for girls between the ages of 11-14. This declaration went against the recommendation of the FDA’s own panel of experts and seemed rather odd, until you take into account the fact that the drug was Plan B, a morning-after contraceptive pill.

The conclusion of the FDA was not that the drug was insufficiently ethical for sales over the counter, but that its medical safety data was inadequate. The basis for this statement was not the scientists who had been hired to make exactly that determination, but an ethical protest from the Bush administration. To put it simply, the Bush administration leveraged their personal bias against scientific understanding and the FDA caved. The root of this problem goes all the way to the highest level of our government and was well summarized by Ron Suskind in his New York Times article, “Without a Doubt.”

George Bush has a policy of infallibility.

Open dialogue with the goal of determining the facts is not seen as valuable. Bush boasts of his ability to govern via intuition and faith. Those who disagree with him are politely handed their hats.

As far as I can tell, Bush is a pure ideologue. Nevermind that I disagree with the bulk of his ideals, but his demagoguery flies in the face of established fact and he is OK with that. His routine is to act impulsively and then attempt to change the state of the union such that the decision appears to have been a good one. This is, of course, not a particularly wise way to conduct one’s affairs.

Anyone who is willing to contradict the scientific apparatus based solely on their personal faith has no business imposing rules and regulations on the people of this country. I demand that my leaders work within the confines of reality.

I recognize that much of the job of president involves making decisions for which there is no one “right” answer, and there may be cases in which a mistake is made due to an incomplete grasp of the facts. However, the current administration will not admit to their mistakes and work to make amends. Furthermore, they are openly flaunting their disdain for science and scientific reasoning.

George W. Bush will not be receiving my vote.

It goes beyond my simply not voting for Bush. I believe that his decision-making methodology is dangerous to the United States of America and therefore his position as President is harmful to our way of life. For this reason I will do what I can to prevent him from retaining his office. Not voting for Bush is a start, but voting for his rival is twice as powerful. Voting for anyone other than Bush and Kerry is functionally equivalent to not voting at all with regards to getting Bush out of office. This is the primary reason why I am voting for John Kerry.

I consider myself a political moderate with liberal tendencies. I believe in increased taxes, increased spending for the common man, and a utilitarian approach to governance. However, I break with the left wing on certain issues, namely nuclear energy and military R&D. There are policies drawn out on Kerry’s website that I take significant exception to, and I do not believe that he is much of a representative for me.

In this representative democracy, I have always taken the stand that I will vote when I find someone who I feel comfortable voting for. I’ve been looking for someone who does a reasonable job of representing me within our government. However, because I am so distant from the Average American, a candidate would be foolish to take my position and still think they could win. You don’t see a lot of atheist, pro-environment, pro-nuclear power guys running (why this is is a subject for a later discussion). This is why I have never cast my ballot in an election before.

So here I am with two candidates, neither one of which I feel represents me to any reasonable degree. Normally, I find the “lesser of two evils” approach to voting to be rather repellant. However, in this case, where I believe there is a significant difference in the magnitude of the evil between the two, my disagreements with Kerry disappear into the noise when compared with my deep vitriol towards Bush’s mental processes. My disdain for Bush is sufficient to overcome my distaste for the lesser of two evils approach.

It is interesting to point out that by voting for Kerry, I am voting for a candidate who has a stated position of canceling existing nuclear weapon R&D funding. That is my job. I am voting for a candidate who is very likely to indirectly cause the removal of significant funding from my group at the lab. Many of my coworkers are voting for Bush simply on the grounds that without his support the nuclear weapons industry may be left in a shambles. I agree that this may be the case, and I believe in and support the nuclear deterrent of this country. However, I believe that the danger posed by another Bush presidency is greater than whatever damage might be caused by a depletion of the scientific knowledge base of our nuclear weapons complex. Currently, our enemies – many of which were created as a result of Bush’s decisions – are not affected by the existence of our nuclear deterrent. We have more pressing needs.

Obviously, I am not voting for the president who will give me the best short-term benefits with regards to my job, the lowest taxes, etc. I am not voting selfishly. I am putting my current job at risk for the future of my country and I urge others in the weapons complex to do likewise. I’m afraid of what another four years of George W. Bush could mean for the long-term future of the United States. When it comes to credibility, we can only do better.

If Bush is re-elected, I will be ashamed of this country. As it is, I’m ashamed to associate myself with a country in which half the people support this man. I fundamentally do not understand this position and am offended by it.

Canada looks better every day.

I went over to my deputy group leader's house last night because he was setting up his 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope to look at the eclipse with. Between the two of us (mostly him), we had quite a bit of fancy optical gear. His telescope was on a good tracking mount and never needed a single adjustment during the four hours we were out. He attached a film camera to the side of the telescope and took some ASA 1600 color print pictures. He also had a pair of image-stabilizing binoculars and a camcorder. I brought my tripod and DSLR with the 100-300mm lens (35mm equivalent to 480mm at full zoom). I took just over 100 pictures of everything from full moon to full moon.

The lunar eclipse is a nice leisurely photographic subject as totality lasts a good hour and twenty minutes. The onset of the shadow is slow and there were plenty of opportunities to catch each phase of the eclipse on CCD despite the large clouds that were periodically obscuring the view. At one point we even went inside for 15 minutes to warm up and look at pictures of the solar eclipses that Steve has photographed (the most recent of which, in Australia, only had 30 seconds of totality!).

The clouds were basically non-obtrusive during the lead-up to totality and throughout totality, but they were frequently in the way during the return to full moon, so there are less pictures of that portion of the show. Actually the cloud cover was almost constant during this time but there were periodic 2-10 second holes in clouds where I could snap off a few pictures. Still, because the clouds were moving so fast and the eclipse progressed so slowly, I managed to get a good representative sample of images.

While we're on the subject of astronomy...

Let's assume that you could see through the hazy atmosphere of Titan and you were looking up at Saturn. How big would it appear in the sky? Certain artistic impressions of the view of Saturn from one of Saturn's moons show it enormous. Are they accurate? Well it turns out it depends widely on which moon, as they are spread out over two orders of magnitude in distance from Saturn.

From Phoebe, the farthest known major satellite, Saturn would be about 0.5 degrees wide - roughly the same apparent diameter as Earth's moon from Earth. From Pan, the closest known major satellite, Saturn would be a whopping 48 degrees wide in your field of view.

From Titan, which is an order of magnitude closer to Saturn than Phoebe and an order of magnitude farther from Saturn than Pan, you would see Saturn as being about 5.7 degrees. Here is an image I made showing Earth's moon in the upper left and a properly scaled Saturn as it would appear in the sky from Titan:

So here's a fun experiment you can do to give yourself an idea of how big Saturn would appear from Pan: If you hold out your hand at arms length and do the "hang loose" hand gesture with your thumb and pinky pointing in opposite directions, the distance from the tip of your thumb to the tip of your pinky is a little more than 20 degrees or so. If you do this with both hands and touch your thumbs together, then the pinky-to-pinky distance will span a bit over 40 degrees. So tonight, as you're looking at the lunar eclipse, do the double-hang-loose with your arms straight and that will give you an idea of how huge Saturn would appear from the surface of Pan. It dwarfs the moon by two orders of magnitude in apparent diameter - and four orders of magnitude in apparent area!! Note that these calculations are just for the planet itself - the rings, from end to end, are roughly twice as wide as the planet!

In case you haven't seen it posted everywhere, there's a total lunar eclipse tonight which will be visible all over the US. The next one isn't for 2.5 years, so catch this one. Unfortunately for me, the weather here is currently entirely overcast and raining. However, this is what it looked like yesterday morning as well, and when the moon rose last night it was relatively clear and beautiful. So we'll see. If the weather cooperates I should have some pictures to show. I'm going to pull out the tripod and the big lens and head down to the overlook for some attempted photography.

These pictures of Titan that are just coming in now from this morning's flyby are amazing.

I've been waiting for some time for a good PDA/cellphone combo that I can buy. The newly released Treo 650 from palmOne is the closest thing I've seen to what I'm looking for.

Here is what it is missing:

I've come across the first CD in my collection which does not have an entry in the CDDB or FreeDB. And the winner is...

Sandals, Feet Single, from their 1994 album "Rite to Silence."

UPDATE:

The very next CD I put in was also not in the database:

Deee-Lite, Picnic in the Summertime Single, from their 1994 album "Dewdrops in the Garden."

For the last two days I have been interviewing for a postdoc position with the Safeguards Science & Technology group in the Nuclear Nonproliferation division at the lab. I met with about 15 people for one-on-one interviews and then gave an hour-long talk about my research and some of my extra-curricular projects.

I was pretty nervous about the whole interview process because I wasn't sure what was involved in a postdoc interview. I assumed that they would be quizzing me to make sure I knew the basics of their work. Given that safeguards are not what my training is in, and that I am attempting to completely change fields by applying to N-1, this was disconcerting.

However, the one-on-one interviews ended up being entirely composed of talking about their work. I felt like they were pitching themselves to me, rather than what I was expecting - the opposite. This was great because it made most of the two days pretty relaxed. All of the various projects they have going look amazing and I liked all of the people I met.

This did leave me wondering what exactly they would base their decision on, and I could only assume that it would be my presentation. Of course, this only added to my stress over preparing the talk. Despite my fears, however, the talk went off without a hitch and they enjoyed hearing about the rocketry and railgun and robotics. Not sure if they cared too much about my thesis work, but then again neither do I.

Apparently the purpose of the interviews is really to judge my character and whether or not people feel like they would enjoy working with me.

After my last interview, I returned to the N-1 group leader's office to return the dosimeter I had been wearing and he made me an offer on the spot. He said "we would be foolish not to offer you a position here." So that's a pretty huge ego booster. In addition, apparently project leaders I had spoken to already were coming by his office to fight over who gets to have me on their project for my post-doctoral work.

The summary of all of this is that I have a post-doc all set up for whenever I finish my thesis work. It's in an awesome group doing really exciting work. I'll get to travel all over the world, get my hands dirty, design and build innovative stuff, and have considerable freedom over what I'm working on. It solves all of the problems I have with my current position. Oh, and I won't have to write any more thesis crap ever again.

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After returning home from the interview and getting out of my suit, I had to prepare for the caving grotto meeting at my house last night which was fun. We made burgers and brats on the grill and watched Mark's slide show from caving in Mexico.

Oh, and Katamari Damacy showed up. I didn't have time to play it before the meeting, so I let the kids play it while we conducted our business. It was hillarious to hear random screams of "PICK UP THE OTHER CROISSANT!!" and "YOU GOT THE TOAD!" coming from the other room during our otherwise dull meeting. Once I had cleaned up from the meeting I quickly played a few rounds of the game before crashing. I have not seen a more weird game ever. But it is addictive.

It was a good day.

Now that we are rapidly approaching winter here, I find that it is dark when I go to work and this makes it currently impossible for me to bike in, as I have no light and no reflectors. Soon the day will be so short that it will be dark when I go to work and dark when I leave. So I've been slowly acruing the gear I need for cold-and-dark bicycling.

While waiting around in Albuquerque for Nina's plane to show up on Saturday, I went by REI and bought a Cat's Eye blinkie tail light and they threw in a free front reflector. Unfortunately, when I got home, I found that the bar clasp on the reflector was too small for any part of my handlebars, and that the ratchet mechanism on the blinkie was busted. No Joy. Thanks, REI.

So I made the big step yesterday of beginning to MP3-ize my entire CD collection. This was largely a result of having found my two missing CD wallets containing the bulk of my CD collection, mostly from the highschool and college eras.

At the end of college, I was thrust into a low-pay grad student environment, a dorm room with a 100bT connection, a university with two OC3 connections to the backbone, and Napster. Since 1998 I have purchased about 10 CDs. Between 1994 and 1998, my college years, I bought about 200 CDs. As much as the RIAA would like to make the connection, this dramatic drop in music purchasing had a lot more to do with my music listening habits than it did to the arrival of Napster.

Anyway, looking back at the CDs I own and haven't seen in years, the vast majority of them are rather embarrassing. Maybe I'll post a list of the 10 worst CDs I own. But some of them are treasures that I can't believe I haven't listened to for all these years. Land of the Loops comes to mind.

Currently I'm using CDex to rip my music to MP3 at 256kbps. The decision not to go with Ogg Vorbis was strictly based on current hardware ogg compatibility. I went ahead with the high bandwidth encoding because harddrives are getting obscenely cheap. I'm averaging about 150M per full-length album encoded, and it takes about five minutes to encode a single CD using my current setup. CDex makes it pretty painless, all I have to do is wander over to the computer every now and again, grab the CD out of the open tray and replace it with a new one, then hit a single key and it takes care of the rest.

Of course I'm going to have to get rid of one of the redundant ROM backups I have taking up 20GB of space if I want to encode all 300 or so CDs that I have...

[UPDATE]
Thanks to technical discussions with some friends (thanks Aaron, Adrian, and Dan), I've changed my digitizing routine a bit. I'm now doing VBR encoding and I've jacked the quality all the way up to maximum so it takes forever to encode a single disc (well, more like a factor of four longer). Still going MP3 instead of OGG since my car stereo can't read OGG.

Immediately upon my return from California I got notice from N-1 (the nuclear nonproliferation group here at the lab) that they were interested in interviewing me for a postdoc position and wanted my interview to be next Wednesday. This involves giving a one hour talk and then two days worth of personal interviews with pretty much everyone in the group. So I've been working my ass off getting everything prepared for that.

Add to that the fact that Ninanana is coming into town today, the unfortunate coincidence that I'm hosting the caving meeting next Thursday, and a trip down to Chupadera the following day and it wouldn't be surprising if you didn't hear from me for a couple weeks. Time to go pick up the Nina! W00t!

It's not sticking, but we're getting a big old icky front moving through and it is definitely snowing in town.

For the first time in six years there are no sunspots on our side of the sun at all. Unlike a year ago, when we saw an estimated X-28 flare (off the scale, which technically only goes to X-10), now the X-ray flux is pathetically low. Here's a SOHO shot of the blank sun. This means no auroras and very bad HF radio propagation for awhile, not that we get much in the way of auroras down here in New Mexico anyway...

It's 6:30am, and I'm in my office. Apparently today is a holiday. I thought the roads seemed a little empty this morning...

SCIENCE!! I spent the last week in California ostensibly attending the NECDC. Unfortunately, due to this summer's shutdown of the laboratory and (to a lesser extent) the DOE weapons complex, a lot of people weren't able to complete their talks. Many talks were cancelled and many more were a little low on actual content. For this reason, I found myself only wanting to see about four talks that were on the agenda. As a result, I spent a lot more time playing mini-golf than my boss would probably approve of.

I got to see Mikkel (first time in a year), Camille (first time in 2 years), and Evan (first time in 10 years!!). Mikkel and I went to a couple of nearby highpoints and enjoyed the view, then walked around the wharf district and had dinner at a nice Italian place. Though I live around big smartypantses now, it's nice to talk to someone who has a totally different perspective and is still up for mind-bending conversation topics. Talking to him gave me the distinct impression that this sort of intellectual chatter is somehow missing from my life as of late. My other outlet for this sort of thing, my roommate Robin, tends to be a little long-winded and it makes the experience wearying.

Speaking of new perspectives, Camille and Evan live on another planet. Seeing them and visiting Pixar reminded me of the fact that there is coolness outside of Los Alamos and Planet Dork. They rule. It's good to know that the "Dan the Janitor" story will never grow old, Evan. The visit to Pixar came at a weird time for Camille as this was the last week for her work on thier new movie, The Incredibles [which, btw, looks amazing and I highly recommend that everyone go see it even though I haven't seen it yet]. Camille and the rest of the incredibles team were clearly being driven pretty hard and in these last days they looked like they had been working 20 hour days for a year. Evan, on the other hand, is on a different film and showed no signs of crunch-time at all. Regardless, it was really refreshing talking to them both and hanging out in such a bizzarely cool environment as Pixar. If I had some sort of clue about movies or animation or whatever, I'd want to work at Pixar with them.

I guess the moral of this story is that my trip to California made me aware, for many reasons, of how isolated my life is in Los Alamos. I desperately need a job that includes more travel. I seem to remember having similar experiences on a lot of my major travels in the past. I always come away feeling... broader. (?) Does this travel make me look fat?

Anyway, here's some pictures from the trip: yay!