Liz's Bloglet - Sunday 9 December 2001

Athens night life involves more chunky glasses than you can conceive. _
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09:38:15 AM, Sunday 9 December 2001

Submarine chefs are the best in the Navy. White House chefs are frequently former submarine chefs. discuss. _
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09:30:59 AM, Sunday 9 December 2001

Yesterday I went to the Institute holiday luncheon (nothing quite like that combination of bad catering and bad wine). Then we saw Ocean's Eleven, which was throughly entertaining in the way that very few movies are. Then we ate ham and pineapple pizza and watched Best in Show. Then Remi was off to play Myth and I watched Billy Elliot. Good, good movies. Good, good day. _
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09:04:39 AM, Saturday 8 December 2001

No more classes for me! _
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03:40:08 PM, Friday 7 December 2001

Why Strom Thurmond is evil:

It is one thing to be a racist pig. That's a simple, stupid evil.

It is quite another thing to exploit the racism of others to further one's own ends, to pad one's pockets, to destroy one's enemies. True evil is delivering the message of hate, not because one hates, but because one feels nothing, has no actual beliefs, not even in some evil ideology.

True evil is spouting racist garbage because it gets you elected to public office.

And all of that goes double for Jesse Helms.

I just delivered this rant to Remi, and I'm so proud of it, I thought I'd share. _
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06:30:50 PM, Wednesday 5 December 2001

Strom Thurmond is 99 today. Proof that only the good die young. Evil is, apparently, immortal. _
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08:02:13 AM, Wednesday 5 December 2001

I just saw the Olympic torch run through campus by one of my classmates. Maybe I'm a big ole dork, but it was pretty cool. _
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07:17:49 PM, Tuesday 4 December 2001

I got honked and hooted at the other day. It was a multiple times a day occurence in Raleigh, pretty much anytime I was going to school or work, but this was the first time in Athens. This probably is because NCSU is 65% male and UGA is 65% female. Anyway, it had been long enough for me to forget how unsettling an experience that can be, especially if I'm in an isolated location when it happens. I'm pretty staunch in my view of gender as a social construct, as many of you are more than aware, but this is a male behavior that I find completely mistifying. _
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08:36:53 AM, Tuesday 4 December 2001

What makes me think I could start clean slated?
The hardest to learn was the least complicated. _
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11:27:14 AM, Monday 3 December 2001

Want. to. sleep. _
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08:39:21 AM, Monday 3 December 2001

I have one more week of class, followed by two take home exams and one actual exam. Given this, I should be joyfully seeing a light at the end of some tunnel or another and have no trouble writing the paper I have to write today. ha. _
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07:47:36 AM, Sunday 2 December 2001

There is a very lovely graveyard right next to us. It covers rolling hills on both sides of the river and has one of the few bridges over the river. Shortly after we moved in I thought it would be a pleasant place to take a walk. This green car kept nearly running over me as I walked around. Finally, as I walked across the bridge, and the car nearly ran me off, it it stopped and the guy inside yelled at me, saying people can't just walk across their bridge. So I left.

The irony of this is that every home football game they allow tailgaters all over the front area of the place (where there aren't any graves). Why is it bad for people in the community to walk through their neighborhood, but it's perfectly acceptable for rich folks from Atlanta to drink beer and act like idiots right next to somebody's grandma's grave?

Today is the last game. _
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10:27:11 AM, Saturday 1 December 2001

I just heard a great lecture by Andy Keeler, who's an economics professor here and was involved in the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol under both Clinton and W. He said that his lecture had two main parts: Policy on Kyoto under Clinton and the Bush administration's thinking...so to speak. He said, as somebody who was there as it was happening, that the decision no to be involved in Kyoto and the declaration that there is no scientific backing for global climate change were decisions made in ignorance that have since been repented of, but of course he administration can't take them back now. He also said, as I think we all knew, that the driving force behind any decision on any subject related to energy is the vice president's commitment to unlimited fossil fuel usage. Thus proving that the vice president is just as blind to the future as he appears. _
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01:49:53 PM, Friday 30 November 2001

Okay, I have definitely chosen the right group to sing with. We are doing Faure's Requiem and Thompson's Peacable Kingdom in the spring and Mikado in the summer. Rehearsals don't start back until January. I hope I can stand to wait... _
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11:36:15 AM, Friday 30 November 2001

Dawn's getting married! _
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07:47:47 AM, Friday 30 November 2001

I just presented my research ideas to my lab group. As one of them so aptly put it afterwards "Everyone wants to design your project." Which is complimentary in that they all find it worthwhile, but less than helpful in that I really do have my own ideas about how I want it to work. Still, it was nice to bounce ideas off of people and get some input into what's a sufficient amount of work. _
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01:46:36 PM, Thursday 29 November 2001

Presentation in a few minutes. It came out huge, thanks to a plethora of photos and the wonders of the google image search. One can type in Athens Georgia and get pictures of downtown. Very useful when discussing the fact that our watershed is 70% impermeable. Thank goodness for zip disks. _
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12:54:36 PM, Wednesday 28 November 2001

Andrew's link to Remi's blog contains my torso. _
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04:50:04 PM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

Powerpoint presentations are conclusive proof that Microsoft is the devil. _
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08:43:48 AM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

I had once seen Pittsburgh from the train. It was a grey March day. The houses stick off the hills funny and the area immediately surrounding the station is not attractive. Based on this, and what I had heard about Pittsburgh from my parents (who had lived there for a few months of winter in the early 70's), I had a fairly low opinion of it. After 2 Thanksgivings there I think I can say that it is a delightful city with many goings on, great actual neighborhoods, and more character than you can shake a lot of sticks at. The houses do stick off the hills funny. _
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04:53:52 PM, Sunday 25 November 2001

It's weird to see that something that cost me tons of sweat, blood (from thorns), and tears (from coworkers who drove me crazy) has finally come into publishable form. The Maryland DNR report on the Little Patuxent Watershed includes a whole lot of data collected by the Chesapeake Bay Crew of the Maryland Conservation Corps during the time I was fortunate to be a member. _
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12:27:43 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

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12:25:25 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

Scalia could save us from Bush's kangaroo court

goodness.

We are in trouble, aren't we? _
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09:04:41 AM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

Walker's Crossing contains the finest juxtaposition of "Danny Boy" and Thompson guns ever. _
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06:37:21 AM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

Note to anthropology students everywhere: the past tense of the verb "to dam" is not "damned". _
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02:24:51 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

<big sigh>
Paper that tried to destroy my soul is mostly vanquished.

There are so many times when I just want to say something because I know it's true (e.g. healthy, happy bugs are good. dead bugs are bad) but finding just the right author's name and date to put in the parentheses always befuddles me. When all else fails, grab big book off of shelf and look in index. Find paper referred to by big book. Refer to paper (carefully looking up paper and reading it first of course.

But it all seems to be there now. It has a lot of bulk, and occasional quality, and many numbers and cool graphs. And pretty pictures are what it's all about. _
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09:38:25 PM, Sunday 18 November 2001

I just happened to be awake a little after 5 this morning and I could actually see the meteors. I saw probably one a minute for twenty minutes (then my feet got cold). Not bad, considering I was on our balcony which means my view was bound on two sides by tall buildings and I'm in the middle of a city anyway. We went to another party at Judy's house in the country last night. We were all joking about spending the night out there and taking a boat out at 5. If I could see as many as I did in Athens, I'm sure it must have been amazing where you can actually see the night sky. _
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07:40:56 AM, Sunday 18 November 2001

The Harry Potter movie rules. It is a wonderful adaptation, which means Rowling realized that not everything in a wonderful book makes a wonderful movie. So she wrote the screenplay for a wonderful movie. The Quidditch scene completely rules. Remember that stupid race in stupid Episode 1 and how long and stupid it was? Well, the Quidditch scene is everything that wasn't. Those kids are flying. There is no question. There are people on broomsticks you've never seen before in the movie, but their characters are developed during the match. You actually understand why they think Quidditch is the best game in the world. It's just amazing. And Harry gets the Snitch. Anyway, I'm sure there are people reading this who think the whole Harry Potter phenomena is silly. Go away. To the rest of you, the movie is wonderful, it will only compliment the book. _
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08:10:42 AM, Saturday 17 November 2001

Oh Moss, Great Guru, could you look at the comments on the Ewan McGregor thread? Mirabai did something terrifying to them. _
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07:45:32 AM, Friday 16 November 2001

I found a beautiful (and useful (well to me)) page: the weather station on the roof of the geography building. They even have a camera so the rest of the world can see how gosh darn gorgeous it is here. I was looking for precip data, very handy since the stream I'm studying right now is next to the geography building. _
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11:59:20 AM, Wednesday 14 November 2001

Avalon is being amusing again. Is it a poor statement on my character that (other than TooFat when it exists) the only web comic I read consistently is a high school soap opera set in Ontario? _
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07:55:33 AM, Wednesday 14 November 2001

We had our first full run-through of Elijah last night. Pretty rough. A run through with the orchestras, two dress rehearsals, and then the performance. Mercifully we are not charging people to hear us. _
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07:43:53 AM, Wednesday 14 November 2001

It occurred to me that you might not all be aware that I have a Ewan McGregor Moulin Rouge poster and you do not. _
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11:07:16 AM, Tuesday 13 November 2001

I just gave my mom the URL so she can read this. Hi mom! _
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02:45:31 PM, Monday 12 November 2001

We now have chairs to go with the table my folks gave us when we moved here. Chairs rule. _
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09:30:43 PM, Sunday 11 November 2001

I realize that I was a bit flippant on Moss's blog, and didn't manage to say what I really meant, so here's another stab at it.

When we're looking at a system, we talk about niches. A niche is "the functional position of an organism in its environment, comprising the habitat in which an organism lives, the periods of time during which it occurs and is active there, and the resources it obtains there." (The Oxford Dictionary of Ecology)

A common ecological question is "why does this particular species occupy this niche (versus other species that occupy this niche in similar systems or similar species occupying other niches in this system)?" Each time we ask this question we are asking "what particular stresses and benefits caused this species to evolve in this way?" We do not add onto every single answer "or it was intelligently designed this way or some other as yet undiscovered cause."

In Baconian science, which we all use whether we acknowledge Sir F. or not, theories can never be proven, only disproven. However, there comes a time when much productive work can be done using a theory that simply does not seem to be disprovable using anything we know. We proceed using that theory, constantly thereby checking it against every new bit of information we find.

There are theories in science which, when used in a scientific paper, require a concluding paragraph in which one acknowledges that there are many other theories that, because of lack of research (or the current inability to be researched), should be considered equally valid. Evolution is no longer one of those theories. Research has persisted in not finding things not explained by the theory. We work just fine every day assuming the theory. Nobody gets anything done with any other theory.

I thought it might be useful to some to have an explanation without a lot of analogies. Analogies can be made to other theories in other sciences. These analogies may be more or less illuminating. I'm not going to make one now. _
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06:43:05 PM, Saturday 10 November 2001

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