In a few hours Ellery and I will be giving our GPTP talk. We went through it last night and I think we’re in pretty good shape, so here’s hoping.
There were some cool talks yesterday, including a predictably excellent one by Riccardo on doing GP backwards! More later as time allows. Now I must shower and we need to try to run through it again.
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From cyclingfans.com, concerning a crash on Monday in the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) bike race (my emphasis):
Euskaltel-Euskadi rider Alberto Lopez de Munain of Spain had a very bad crash [Monday] that had television viewers the world over thinking the worst as he lay motionless on the road after hitting his head on a barrier. Alberto did suffer serious injuries but thankfully his life is not in danger, according to reports.
Alberto’s helmet very likely saved his life. Crashes are part of the sport but scares like Alberto’s crash yesterday certainly make you pause. His team manager has left the Giro to stay with his rider.
Best wishes for a full and speedy recovery, Alberto.
So wear your helmet, damn it!
Given how many people I know who’ve had helmets really save their bacon (including our Chancellor, Sam Schuman), it really amazes me to see all these people zooming around without them.
One that really took the cake was several weeks ago when I saw a father/daughter pair in town. She was riding on the correct side of the road (the right here in the U.S.) and did have a helmet on. Unfortunately the straps were so loose that she might as well have been wearing a baseball cap for the good it would have done her. And Dad? No helmet, and on the sidewalk! Aaarrrggghhhh! Why do parents do this crap?
Where’s Captain Hook and his gang of evil pirates when you need them?!?
No tag for this post.Ellery and I have made it safely to Ann Arbor for this year’s GPTP (Genetic Programming in Theory and Practice) (reports on the 2003 and 2004 workshops) hosted by the Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS) at the University of Michigan.
We present our paper on Friday morning, which means we get to spend much of tonight finishing and practicing our presentation. It’ll be the first time I’ve ever used a computer/projector presentation; so far I’ve been a complete luddite and used SliTeX transparencies. We’re not using Evil Empire Software™, however. We’re using the Beamer classes with LaTeX :-).
We ran into Riccardo and Chris at the airport, which was cool. I didn’t expect to see Chris since he’s mostly been a GA (Genetic Algorithms) person instead of a GP (Genetic Programming) person in the past, but it’s excellent that he’s here with Riccardo.
We’re going to go eat dinner now. More later! (The hotel has wireless throughout, so I’ll probably blog way too much.)
No tag for this post.Yup. Just stuck it right in the water, sloshed it around some, and then set it in the sink to dry. No idea if it worked yet, but it was a whole lot more feasible (time wise) than popping every key cap off and cleaning underneath with a swab. Lots of crud definitely came out, though, which is a good sign.
This bizarre behavior on our part was precipitated by an accident involving two kids and a water bottle with a stubborn lid. I’m guessing that the spilled water dissolved some of the roughly four years of accumulated grime, causing it to ooze into various places it didn’t belong. I’d read in numerous places that you could just wash a keyboard in a bucket of water if you let it dry well before you used it, but never tried it. It’s even been reported that you can use a dishwasher without soap and no heat in the drying, but we weren’t quite brave enough to try that.
Most of the reports are pretty adamant that we really need to let this thing dry well, so we’ll probably wait several days before trying it out (it’s pretty humid at the moment). If that works, though, we’ll need to wash the other one as well and maybe the one in my office since they’re pretty darn grotty.
And if that works then I may haul in some of the really grotty keyboards from the Computer Science lab and stick ‘em in the dishwasher. Some of them are pretty nasty, but we could get through quite a few of them in one pass through the dishwasher :).
Stay tuned for more on the outcome!
No tag for this post.I recorded the wonderful KUMM radio show that my American Roots Music First Year Seminar groups put on last December, but the seam where one CD ended and the next began happened to fall right in the middle of Grace and Kristin’s live duet. Grace Doval and Kristin Bennett did a killer a cappella medly of Aesop Rock’s “9-5ers anthem” and Lyle Lovett’s “Walk through the bottomland”. This is hardly an obvious combination, but they really made it work, pulling together all sorts of interesting ideas and traditions in just under 4 minutes of great singing.
I’d promised to pull the two halves out of the recordings and stitch them together so Grace and Kristin could have a decent copy of their performance. I only just got around to it, and it was really fun to hear bits of that show. The students from those two sections did a great job, and I suspect that I’ll enjoy rediscovering my recordings of that two hour show for years to come.
While I was fiddling with that I also ended up listening to “Teenage Dreams So Hard To Beat” again. This is the excellent one hour documentary of John Peel’s life presented by Jarvis Cocker as part of the great “Keep it Peel” tribute BBC Radio 1 did last December. Still made me smile, and it still made my eyes water, which is quite something given that I never met or spoke to Peel, and it’s now been nearly six months since his death.
Wow.
Currently listenting to: “Uberman” from Ed Hall’s totally loud and wonderful album Albert. That’s just such fun to head bang to in a crazy punk way - I wish I could capture that great noisy guitar riff in words so I could share :-).
I need to restore that deal that used to display the last 10 songs I’d listened to on iTunes on the right hand side here, but that’ll probably have to wait until June or July. It has to at least wait until I fix comments on WeatherGirl’s blog. And now there’s version 1.5.1 of WordPress to install. Just too much to do!
No tag for this post.Apparently our local elementary school lost quite a lot of computer equipment (a server, switches, hubs, printer, and drives) over the weekend. 
Our schools are doing tremendous work (e.g., the excellent 5th/6th grade band concert and the amazing Peter Pan last week) with limited resources (here and the MARQS site), and it really sucks when some fools stab the community like this. This is classic “kicking them while they’re down”, and I really hope this gear makes it back to the school pronto. Unfortunately it’d be pretty hard to fence here, so I suspect it’s moving elsewhere at good speed.
Of course I’m really supposed to be grading instead of posting about things like this, but it just annoys me so. Argh…
Currently listening to: Steve Moore’s cool found sound piece “A quiet gathering” from the collection CMCD.
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Yeah, so I’m a major putz and completely gapped Mother’s Day. With grading and finals and getting ready for GPTP and the million events and blah and blah and blah, I honestly had no idea how close we were until WeatherGirl mentioned it yesterday. Busted!
I actually had a cool idea about two weeks ago for a present for her, but haven’t had time to follow through. Excuses, excuses…
So Sub-Evil and I whipped up a card and cut some nice (if small) wildflowers from the garden (we’re just getting our first blooms on the early stuff). Not exactly the most memorable Mother’s Day, I’m afraid, but it is what it is.
Tomorrow (when things in Morris are open once again), Sub-Evil and I will have to conspire on a less frantic expression of our appreciation for the wonder that is WeatherGirl. In the meantime: WeatherGirl, you’re the best thing that ever happened to me!
And of course a big shout out to my Mom, who’s a damn cool lady. I’ll also put in a plug for my most excellent sister, who’s been a great (and fiesty) force for goodness in my life and that of Sub-Evil and WeatherGirl.
You all rock!
No tag for this post.The Minneapolis Star-Tribune printed 11 letters today sent in response to their “invitation to readers on ID/evolution“. Mine was not among them, but most of those that they did print were definitely better than mine anyway so I’m totally cool with it.
The bulk of the letters (8 of the 11) were in support of the cause, and none of the remaining three could make any claims to being even a vaguely plausible argument in favor of neo-creationism. Since the paper probably used the number and balance of letters they received to help decide on the distribution of letters to publish, I figure my letter helped get some of those good ones printed, and that’s a happy thought.
One of the real high points is a high school sophomore (Benjamin Segal) from Minnetonka (where “the opposition’s” Dave Eaton is on the School Board - yikes!), who did an excellent job of pointing out the serious problems of any system that allows for miracles:
Scientific theories must be falsifiable: It must be possible to prove them wrong. Yet ID proponents can always claim that any evidence challening their “hypothesis” was planted by “the designer” to deceive us. It’s impossible to repond to such an assertion.
Someone here at UMM needs to get started on recruiting this fellow!
The three “pro-ID” letters were pretty weak. One basically came down to “Bad Paul! Athiest! Athiest!”, without even mentioning either ID or evolution; one wonders why the Strib bothered printing it. The second follows in a similar vein, but at least connects to the subject at hand, claiming that
Evolution is by nature atheistic. It requires that death be considered a natural part of life, instead of a result of The Fall as described in the Book of Genesis.
Wow - to think that all those zillion microbes that die around the world every minute are suffering for the follies of a few humans.
The third is a real gem, providing no actual argument (do I sense a trend here?), but instead quoting two “well-known evolutionists” saying that it’s important to look carefully at all the facts, and to study both the strengths and weaknesses of our current understanding. I always love this incredibly silly approach. This is presumably done in an effort to sow some seeds of doubt, but betrays an truly remarkable failure to understand the scientific process, since any reasonable scientist would agree enthusiastically that these things must be studied carefully and especially at their weak points. The rub, as Mr. Segal pointed out so nicely above, is that this study must be based on evidence and falsifiable claims, and ID just ain’t there.
Oh, and the two “well-known evolutionists”? They turn out to be Charles Darwin and (…wait for it…) Stanley Salthe. Huh? Darwin was a remarkable fellow and a real hero in the story, but hardly represents the cutting edge of contemporary evolutionary theory (and would almost certainly be aghast at the continued use of his embryonic ideas as straw men in these arguments). Salthe, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be the champion of evolution the letter writer suggests, as his web page makes clear:
I see [reducing all evolution to the effects of competition] as morally vicious, if understandable in the genealogical sense that it serves as a myth congenial to capitalism.
Yowza! He’s clearly focussing on the scientific evidence.
Good job to PZ for setting things up so well in the first place, and to all those that wrote in on behalf of some common sense on this issue. You should also check out PZ’s response to these letters, as he includes all three “opposition” letters in full, as well as providing some more context for the Darwin quote mentioned above.
Apparently you can get all this stuff on-line, but you have to register, blah, blah, blah…
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I put 2 and 2 together and realized that tomorrow (Sunday, 8 May 2005, 2-4pm) is our last radio show of the 2004-2005 school year - yikes! No cool guests scheduled like last week, but it should still be fun in a more typical Unhindered By Talent sort of way (whatever the hell that means!). So tune in at 89.7FM if you can see UMM’s spiffy new wind turbine from your house, and the rest of you can listen on-line.
Sorry, by the way for the complete silence over the last week. The end of the semester is kicking me about the room, and I’m currently trying to get things ready for the Genetic Programming in Theory and Practice (GPTP) workshop in Ann Arbor next week. Going to a workshop during the second half of finals week just wasn’t the smartest plan. The interview with Dr. Reagon was a complete blast, and her concert with the UMM Choir on Tuesday was really something. I really need to say more soon before it completely leaves my head, but there are too many fires to put out first.
If you’re in desparate need of a fix, WeatherGirl’s life settled down a tad and she had a fun flurry of posting last week in my absence. Her “Madness in the mid-west” post is particularly recommended both for her comments on the whole “Cootie shots” silliness and her archiving of the substantial number of excellent letters sent to the local paper on the issue. There’s some great stuff there, and gives one reasons for optimism in the fight against ill-informed bigotry. (I also recommend PZ’s comments here and there.)
Finally, I should also point out that it snowed here on both the 1st and 2nd of May. There are days when I truly wonder why human beings actual establishment settlements this far north.
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