Thursday 24 February 2005 at 11:39 am
What the hell is wrong with the Northern Virginia/DC/Maryland metroplex, that vast smear of urban wasteland? The
forecast is for 4 to 7 inches of snow today and
people are coming unglued. The schools are closed; the universities are closed; MetroRail may have to stop running above-ground trains; the end is nigh! Good Lord, it is not like it never snows here; it is not like it never snows more than half an inch a day here; it is not like there are no salt/sand trucks or plows. I just don't get it. Maybe it is because I lived in Minnesota; Minnesotans treat snow the way we Louisianians treat hurricanes, namely, don't call me if it is less than the Apocalpyse. I will agree, given the poor quality of drivers in Maryland, that it may be desirable to keep most of them off the roads until summer. In fact, we just need to keep them off the roads. Then my commute would be a lot faster.
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Tuesday 22 February 2005 at 10:10 am
Ack, it is always hard to get back into a work groove after a few days off. Not to mention that today is effectively Monday, so I have to do everything much more slowly to avoid sstupid mistakes that set me back two or three days. But there was a good omen this morning when I caught the thought-to-be-mythical 6:30 AM 15X bus (express between New Carrollton and Greenbelt Stations); I was at my desk by 7:25, which is pretty darned good. All of my AIREML jobs to estimate pairwise correlations for Holstein persistency finished over the weekend and the solutions seem reasonable. I do worry, though, that some reviewer might give me a hard time over my 0.5% sampling scheme; what can I say -- the 1% sample was too large and would segfault.
It was nice to have a long weekend, but we didn't do much. I made a CD of MP3s to listen to on the way to work and I got some new socks. Hm. That seems pretty sad. Oh, of course! We went to D.C. Saturday, met up with our friend Rebecca, and went to Air and Space. Then we had dinner. Mmm...beer and garlic fries...
The cat gets his head stuck in his food dish. It's quite funny.
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Thursday 17 February 2005 at 1:37 pm
In the January 7, 2005, issue of Science, there is an ethics column
"Is Tobacco Research Turning Over a New Leaf?" that is pretty interesting. The issue at hand is whether or not university researchers should accept research grants from tobacco companies. Opponents say no, and some organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, are going to deny funding to researchers who do take industry money. Their basic is that (1) that money is generated by a product that kills almost 5,000,000 people every year, and (2) the industry has a long history of manipulating experiemntal results to protect their products. Those in favor make the point that people are going to smoke anyway -- no teenager who smokes in the U.S. today can truthfully claim ignorance of the adverse effects of smoking on one's health -- and that there is a significant public health benefit to developing safer and less-addictive products.
Since I come down in the "pro" camp, I would like to make a few comments on this. It is absurd for university provosts and chancellors to prohibit faculty from taking tobacco company grants while basing tenure and promotion decisions overwhelmingly on the amount of extramural funding secured. This kind of market-driven thinking, reinforced by state budgetary crises across the nation during the Bush presidency, is very harmful to university science. Additionally, no competent scientists or policymaker should give any serious consideration to scientific work that has not been through a process of peer review. Finally, like it or not, tobacco is a legal product here in the United States. As long as it remains legal to manufacture and sell tobacco products, tobacco industry grants should be a legitimate form of support for scientific research. If this is not the case, if acceptance of those funds is unethical, then so is acceptance of grants from polluting industries, pharmaceutical companies, and a host of private foundations, all of which have agendas to advance. It would also, by extension, be unethical for universities to accept grants from the Department of Defense, whose specific mission is to kill people and break things.
The slippery slope is an uncomfortable place to stand, isn't it?
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Wednesday 16 February 2005 at 3:34 pm
Note that I have removed the "Last Referrers" block from the front page. I really don't want to advertise anyone's pr0n site on my blog, thank you. If any of you were tripping naughtiness filters at work it should be a thing of the past.
Tuesday 15 February 2005 at 1:30 pm
...it will be legal to tase any public transit-using asshat who feels the need to stand right next to you at the bus stop and chain smoke filterless Camels. Once they are down and twitching you can keep whatever you find in their pockets and deliver no more than three (3) swift kicks to squishy parts of their anatomy (one (1) if wearing steel-toed boots or shoes). In fact, I may institute some sort of bounty system -- bring me an offender's finger and Zippo (tm) and you get a week-long bus pass or something. I mean, Jebus, is there a sign hanging around my neck that says, "Clean air hurts me, please help"?
I would also like to throw props to whatever jackasses did not feel the need to put up signs at the New Carrollton Metro station to the effect that there are two different bus bays -- not within line-of-sight of each other -- served by two different sets of buses. Including the one that I needed to catch to get to work on time. 'Preciate you.
On the plus side, I did see
Acela blowing down the CSX mainline this morning. That thing can strip bark off of trees with its backdraft. I bet it's fun to drive.
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Friday 11 February 2005 at 08:23 am
As I was walking through the turnstile at the Greenbelt Metro station I thought to myself, "There sure are a lot of cops in here." When I got to the bus lane where the USDA Shuttle stops (closest to the station doors, woohoo!) there were a Greenbelt Police car, a Metro Transit Police explosive dog detector unit (with dog still in vehicle and barking madly at everything), and a Metro Transit Police car. As I stood there in the terrible cold another MTP car drove up and a strapped guy in body armor went inside (well, okay, so they all wear body armor these days, even some of the dogs). A few minutes later the Greenbelt and canine officers came out and drove away. Three hulking, 'roidhead-looking officers walked a perp out talking trash to him the whole way (I was very close to them and overheard what they were saying), patted him down in front of everyone for maximum humiliation, put him in the car and drove off. I am sure that the Greeneblt and canine units were there because they were the closest responders; they did not pull the dog out or anything. I don't know what the guy they arrested did to get five cops out to the Metro; maybe he made some stupid joke about blowing the place up. I need to get a cheapo little digital camera for moments like these.
Friday 04 February 2005 at 2:25 pm
Well, this is nice. I just got an invitation to a meeting with the director of BARC Monday morning. My boss and the other new scientist in the lab are also attending . Thanks to the lack of sophistication of e-mail list management around here we also know that new SYs from other labs are invited. The meeting is about the Fiscal Year 2006 budget. I assume that we will hear tales of hardship and sacrifice. Hopefully we will not hear that we are going to be out-of-doors come October or whenever the hell the Federal fiscal year changes. You have to love the thinking behind this -- let's send people an ominous-sounding e-mail and leave them the weekend to ponder what's coming. You have to love the government. In realisty I expect that we will be told that Congress and the President are looking for palces to cut-back the budget, and that the next few years are going to be lean ones. We will be encouraged to seek support, both legislative and financial, from industry. That kind of thing. I hope.
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