Monday, June 30, 2008

tragedy of tragedies?

A couple weeks ago, I saw that the cacti outside of the Wells Fargo near my home had sprouted some crazy large white flowers. This was on a Friday. On Monday, I came back to take a picture of these flowers, cuz they were so crazy. Alas, they had already withered and closed! I thought maybe it was because it was the morning and they had not opened yet, so I came back again at one-ish, and still they were wizened (that is my new word from this morning's NYT xword). Tragedy of tragedies! Here is a sad picture of the closed flowers:




In order to find a photo of the plant in full bloom, I've been trying to identify the cactus type today. I think it looks a lot like the Echinopsis Pachanoi, aka the San Pedro cactus. Here are some photos:


Both photos from Echinopsis Flowers by Trent.

Anyways, looks to be a match, right? Well, here is interesting fact number 1. It is a night bloomer! So, I will go back tonight and see if it is now in bloom! Only problem is it has been a few weeks, so perhaps I am in for disappointment. But, there is hope! Fact number 2: It can grow to up to 40 feet tall. That is tall! Here is a picture of a tall one:

From eFloras.

Fact number 3 is that the plant contains mescaline. Wikipedia says:
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the highest concentrations of active substances are found in the layer of green photosynthetic tissue just beneath the skin.
So, if you're (a) resourceful and (b) looking to score some unguarded mescaline, here's the place:

PS Please don't eat the pretty pretty cacti! I was only trying to be cool!

Thursday, June 26, 2008

what's that song they play when a goal is scored?

I'm sure you've been wondering, "What is that awesome awesome song played when someone scores a goal in the Euro Cup 2008?" Well, here it is. I have no other information.

notes on resuscitating my desktop 06/2008

I have a dual-boot Windows XP/Ubuntu desktop at home. Earlier this week, it started randomly rebooting itself at increasingly shortening intervals. Luckily, my brother was visiting and could try to fix everything. We decided to get a new motherboard, CPU, and memory.

New hardware:

Motherboard: GeForce 7050M-M
CPU: AMD X2 5600+
Memory: A DATA DDR2 800 Dual Kit (4 GB)
TR2-R1 CPU fan

You can replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory, then boot up into Ubuntu, and it should work. It did not work immediately on my Ubuntu installation, as I was still running Feisty and did not have all the drivers necessary for my new motherboard and could not start x. So, we logged in without x (Ctrl+Alt+F4), then upgraded the OS. This required the following commands:

sudo aptitude install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

We did this two times; first upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy, then Gutsy to Hardy. Then, Ubuntu seemed to work.

Next, we tried to repair Windows. We could not boot Windows (it blue screened). Apparently, we should have removed any drivers specific to the old motherboard before replacing it. Of course, we could not boot windows when the original motherboard was going bad, so ... These pages: ars-technica article and ars technica forum give some instructions on how to repair Windows. Supposedly, if we had done things properly, we may have been able to put in the Windows XP disk, hit install, then repair, then let Windows do its magic.

This did not seem to work for us, so we reinstalled Windows, but did not reformat the partition. Thus, we could still see all of our files once installation was complete, but we lost all installed programs. After installing Windows and all the drivers for the new motherboard, Windows seemed to be working okay.

Of course, installing Windows wiped out the Grub menu list, so we could no longer boot into Ubuntu. There were a number of solutions to this problem presented on the Ubuntu forum here, none of which seemed to work. We first tried the Auto Super Grub Disk option. With this, we downloaded an exe which added an extra option to the boot menu, "unetbootin-supergrubdisk". We rebooted, selected this new option, and let it run. It ended up hanging at the
running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 ( hd0)"...
step. We had no idea why. So, we tried many of the other options offered at the Ubuntu forum, with no luck. We burned a Hardy live cd, booted from that, and tried to install grub. After this, we could not even boot Windows.

The first problem seemed to be that in Hardy the hard drive was called sda instead of hda. We got an old Feisty live cd and booted from that. My brother tried many things, but was unable to restore Grub. The final solution seemed to be to set the bootable flag for the Linux partition in the partition table. Previously, only the Windows partition was listed as bootable. The change the bootable flag, my brother used:
fdisk /dev/hd
then followed the menu to change the labels. After this, he rebooted from the Feisty CD, installed Grub again following the first set of instructions under "Quick Start" here. Everything seemed to work!!

To download Windows software from Caltech, I also set up the Caltech VPN, detailed here. So far, programs we have installed are:
Firefox
Flash
Avast
WinSCP
NX Client for Windows
Office 2007
Acrobat

Here are photos of the process:


It is a mess in here. There are computer innards strewn all over the place.

We could not read the blue screen that flashed for a split second when Windows tried to boot, so we took a photo. Turns out, it wasn't saying anything particularly useful.

I did not go crazy during this process.

Monday, June 16, 2008

changeaxisunits.m

I have been plotting lots of properties of walking flies for like the past month. My brain works in the units of pixels and frames, but in fact the scientists prefer to think in centimeters and seconds (stupid, logical scientists). I had been changing all of my plotting commands to respect this. Today, I had the brilliant idea just to change the scale of the axes post-plotting with the function changeaxisunits.m. By the way, there are tons of random functions I use fairly often in that directory. Feel free to use and abuse!

Random plot modified using this code:

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Spazmotron & Premium & Me

I have two pet mice, Spazmotron and Premium. They are little cutie pies. And they are fatties cuz I love to give them treats. I know I should not, but I cannot help spoiling them. Their favorite activities are sleeping, eating, grooming, running on their mouse wheel, chewing up & tearing apart pieces of cardboard, and making forts out of the remaining shreds of cardboard. Here are some photos:

Spazmotron & Premium: Best Friends 4ever! They really do seem to like each other. They sleep together in a pile in their little house, give each other back rubs, and generally just follow each other around the cage. Occasionally, they'll get in little tiffs over food or pieces of cardboard, but they will always be best friends.


Spazmotron, Premium, & me


Spazmotron wearing a lovely ass hat.


And for my French friend who likes photos of animal bottoms, here you go. I call it "What what in the butt".

You can see the whole set of photos on Flickr here.

Friday, June 13, 2008

free toy inside!

Cereal companies are clever. I mean, who could resist the promise of "BIG YELLOW TASTE" offered by Kelloggs' Pops?
Or the free "Indiana Jones Adventure Spoon" advertised on my Apple Jacks?
Not .... I. ... Not ... I. Of course I want my cereal spoon to light up! Coolest laser pointer ever, by the way. (P.S. That's my hand! Look, there's the ring that my mom got me at Long's Drugs when I was 10! First picture of me on this blog!)

Disclaimer: I also fell for Ralph's brand "Fruit Flavored Whirls". I am, apparently, just a sucker for sugar cereals.


Anyways, that's all the news on the cereal front. "Good night, sweet prince."

Thursday, June 12, 2008

what is it?



Guess what it is! Go on, guess! It is the scales on the eyespot of a luna moth. Read more at Wikipedia. I think it is byooootiful.

Continuing our 4 million part series Better Know an Insect (this time with an actual insect!), here is the most fun factoid about luna moths that I read at Wikipedia:

Their wings are very small when they first emerge and they must enlarge them by pumping bodily fluids through them. During this time, their wings are very soft and fragile and they must climb somewhere safe to wait for their wings to harden before they can fly away. This process takes about 2 hours to complete. The Luna moth has a wingspan of between 8–11.5 cm with long, tapering hindwings, which have eyespots on them in order to confuse potential predators. Although rarely seen due to their very brief (1 week) adult lives, Luna moths are considered common. As with all Saturniidae, the adults do not eat or have mouths. They emerge as adults solely to mate, and as such, only live approximately one week.
So, pretty standard for a moth, I think. Mainly, they are pertty. Here are some more pictures:


Also from Wikipedia, photo of a male luna moth inflating his wings after coming out of his cocoon.


From khasan at Flickr. I think this one looks like a ballerina.


From mbryan777 at Flickr. Fuzzy!


From David Marine at Flickr. Look at the baby!


From anandajoy at Flickr. Another moth just inflating its wings. This photo illustrates just how huge those suckers are.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

fructose malabsorption: an allergy to consciousness

Here is the cover for my band's new album, "an allergy to consciousness". Here are the instructions on how to make your own, copied from here, among other places.
Always wanted to be in a rock band?

Well, here's your chance...sort of. Make your own CD Cover with the following steps and rocket yourself to mulit-platinum status and start fending off the groupies.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. ???

5. Profit
I particularly like the South Park reference at no. 4.

Here is mine:



Here's another one:


There are way way better ones here. Made by very creative people. This article in the Boston Globe has a good greatest albums list.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

it's june! remember the date, arcadian style!



It's June! Even though I no longer have summer vacation (sadness), it still feels like the beginning of the weekend in June. I've been browsing BibliOdyssey this morning. Stumbled upon the Arcadian Calendar for 1910 by Vernon Hill. To quote the above linked site,
It is genuinely creepy - malevolent and original.
I Photoshopped it so that it now is for June 2008. That's not a waste of time :).