My son’s troop just went on it’s semi-annual bike trip on the silver comet. Between these trips and what we did as a cub den, I think I’ve “section-biked” the whole thing. Anyway we started from Esom station, near, the Alabama state line, and went to “the Rock”, just past Rockmart. We had a nice detour into Rockmart to find the dairy queen. The scouts, ranging from a Webelos 2 who was tagging along to those working on their Eagles had a great time.
Just at the open house for a high school that one of my sons would like to attend. We wandered into the science area to see the demonstrations (after a very nice chat with what looks to be an excellent mathematics teacher) and see members of the current 9th grade class doing something that resembles chromatography on leaves. Except, it sort of was and it sort of wasn’t. The front’s were awful. So since I’ve used a lot of TLC in my murky past, I thought I’d ask a few questions. “what is the solvent? ammonicial ethanol?” – “it’s chromatography solvent”, and that’s what was on the label. So I asked the instructor what were they using. “It has ether in it, I think”.
ARRGH!
ARRGH!
ARRGH!
What they were doing was to put a leaf on a piece of filter paper and use a hard implement like a pencil to crush the leaf along the origin (or start). This damages the paper and means that it is impossible to get a clean chromatogram, and for that matter a reproducible one. Useless bloody useless.
It is just “cargo cult” magic. They don’t know what they are doing or why and they can’t get good results with the method they are using by rote.
If they wanted to do it right, they needed to know what the solvent was, and maybe try a few variations or at least understand why it might work. They should crush the leaves with a little bit of sand in a separate vessel and extract it with a solvent to produce a clean dot on the origin. As a control, they should do the same with a couple of solvents, and as a final control extract just the sand. That would be an experiment.
The scouts in my son’s troop have set up their own facebook group. We adults can be fans (and are), but don’t run it. There is also a troop google group that we adults run and use for “serious” business.
It seems to work very well. The scouts are taking ownership of their troop. As fans the adults can respond to questions the scouts raise, but can’t initiate topics. Sometimes the teenage humor is a bit odd, but it’s generally restrained – which is good – because this is a public site.
Having teenagers, who like to play computer games – including online ones, we have two desktop machines at home (not counting the museum pieces like a windows 95 machine that doesn’t say “with internet explorer” from back when the internet was “just a fad” (Gates W. 1995)). The “adult” machine was getting to feel a little pokey (windoze 2000, EPIA board that I want to use as an embedded machine, no free disk space), so it was time to build a new one. I also wanted to play with the Nvidia CUDA language extensions and it is a little bit silly to try to put a high end graphics board into an antique machine.
So off to Fry’s we go. (one of the perks of living in a “high tech” area are computer parts supermarkets).
Ended up with an MSI 770-C45 board, a quad AMD 64 bit machine, CPU fan, a PNY 1024M CUDA enabled graphics board, a terabyte SATA drive, 4GB DDR3 memory, a new wireless card and a new power supply. The case, floppy drive, DVD reader, and CD burner are left from the old machine.
The hardware snapped together pretty quickly and then the fun began. Windows XP doesn’t recognize SATA drives, and while the floppy is there, getting the drivers off the MSI DVD is fraught with peril. In fact, two burnt disks latter, I say the heck with it and try to load Ubuntu 8. (the other machine also has a 64bit AMD chip so we had the disks). It well past the “sell by date” and isn’t compatible with the new hardware. So out of frustration, I go back to XP and ignore all the warnings about unrecognized hardware. Miraculously it loads, and even more miraculously it runs! Turn’s out, in an undocumented feature of the mother board, there is an IDE emulation for SATA. Slower than pure SATA, but still fast.
Cool, now just to configure the wireless card, reboot a few dozen times then download the latest Ubuntu for the rest of the machine. Opps. While the new AMD chipset and fan is very quiet in terms of sound. they emit enough radio waves to make the wireless non-functional. Open the case, put in the old card, and its a little better. At least it’s now a registered copy and I can download the antivirus software (by the way these are all legal university staff license copies of software) and firefox, I think moving the antenna away from the machine will solve this, and we’ll see when the coax cable arrives.
In the meantime, I downloaded and burnt a cd of the newest (9.10) Ubuntu on an old Mac. Which did something to the ISO so that it was a bad image. Oh well. do it again, but this time at work (the download) and burn the CD at home (USB disks are really great for this). Now we have Ubuntu up.
So how is it working? Internet connections are ghastly (average about 1-10% of maximum speed) due to RF-noise. CPU speed is amazing, especially with Ubuntu. We see all 4 CPU’s and things that are slow to load like open office scream. I have some more tuning to perform, but it is impressive.
Update: Using a 10ft (3M) cable to move the WIFI antenna works as expected. In fact I’m using the machine to make this edit.
Just taught my Halloween special lecture in computer security and am reminded about the ease of fooling yourself. The lecture itself is about some mis-leading statistics and a bit of slight of hand. The use and more importantly the design of control experiments is critical in science to help avoid fooling yourself.
Slight of hand itself is a good example of the fooling yourself. You can’t mislead your audience unless you, sort of, mislead yourself. When doing the “french drop” or the pass vanish – you have to look at where the coin or ball should be and not where it is. The magic isn’t convincing unless you look like you”re convinced too. Smoothness helps, but the audience looks where you direct them.
In science, getting the answer you want and expect is always troubling. If you aren’t wrong most of the time, then you aren’t working at the bleeding edge. You need to moral courage to keep at it. This is one of the hardest things to teach, but one of the most critical things that my students need to learn.
I’m still debating shelter options. The best weight I can find is from Gossamer Gear (8.8 oz), but the shelters are a bit on the small side – nothing you could use, without going stir crazy, for more than a night. Most of the Sylon tarps are about 15 oz and the lightest groundsheet I can find is 1.5 oz or so (also from gossamer gear). So, counting stakes and lines at about the same weight, I’m looking at about 1 lb savings but having a much larger dry area. So the Mountain Laurel Designs pentagonal tarp is looking the best.
I generally don’t discuss my scientific work in detail on this blog because
That said, it is worth giving a link so you can see what we do here.
Pubmed makes this easy. Hitting this link should show most of my more than 200 publications on areas ranging from bioinformatics to molecular design and HIV. My apologies to the occasional other Harrison, RW (actually several – I have a common name) that it grabs.
Had a chance to go backpacking this last weekend & since it was arranged at the last minute we ended up going to the section of the Pinhoti trail near Dalton that I’ve posted a map of before.
It was cold. Not Northern winter cold, but cold none the less.
I’d replaced my leaky self-inflating pad with a z-pad. They came as full length and so I shortened it to 3/4 length to give me more room in the pack and because I use clothing and the other pad from my pack for my feet anyway. That worked well. My very lightweight summer bag (REI Nooksack – they don’t make it anymore for good reason!) finally has met its temperature match. It’s fine with a silk liner & polypros & a fleece to about 32F (0), but then you have to be careful about stretching it as you move. If you stretch it thins the insulation and then you are sort of chilly.
The trip was a first-time backpacking trip for a couple of young scouts (70-80lbs 11-12 years old). They had a good time. It is critical to check their packs and ruthlessly remove extra weight. One of my bette noirs about normal youth packs is the weight. If the pack itself weighs 4-5 lbs then the youth only has weight-room for another 5 lbs before they are overloaded. I wish there were an ultralight pack sized for youth. It is also good to let them set the pace and keep an eye on their tiredness. If they seem to be dragging – guess what – the adult should say he’s tired because they will only admit tiredness when truly exhausted (and that’s no fun).
We saw lots of persimon trees, but none with any fruit. Found some bear droppings and they were full of persimon seeds. So that explained a lot.
I also demonstrated freezerbag cooking which mostly worked, but can be a real mess if the food is too gooey. I was reading the “as the crow flies” blog and the author uses a different technique with a spatula to clean her pots. I’m thinking that may be better in the end.
(followup on my last post)
The structure prediction server is back online. There was a combination of events that caused it, but the fix involved:
Thanks to Shaochieh and Yan Fang for their help.
Just found out that my structure prediction server, which is part of an international experiment, cited as an example of the quality of our work and used in courses is off-line. Well off-line to the world, but not inside of GSU. It was taken off-line silently without informing the responsible people for some reason. ARRGH!
I guess we are continuing our dive-to-the-bottom (r)
And I thought we were doing well for an institution that’s only been a research university for 15-20 years.
This is actually worse than slightly embarrassing. I was planning to volunteer to build a data verification server for casp (being a half-breed experimentalist I am uniquely qualified to test models against real data rather than some abstract geometric measure), but if I can’t keep my own server on-line why should they trust me to develop one for them? I finally was able to build a stable server by using linux and excluding direct student participation in the production version (they tend to turn it off) and now the university seems determined to bury us.
It gets even more fun. We have a help line that is supposed to handle these things. It simply flags the department manager who then flags it which then flags him …
It’s truly insidious in its design. It looks to the GSU environment like everything is fine (and as of a week ago was fine), but doesn’t read from the outside and doesn’t write to the outside so the carefully engineered server is DOA. The server is designed to be relocatable and to have multiple frontends, but that doesn’t help if it is locked up because some dum s..t can’t be bothered to fix the network settings.
We also had fun with someone disconnecting all the cables in the lab. This was followed by reseting the various switches to non-functional status. Isn’t GSU a great place.
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