Overdue Pictures

Hey everyone. I finally broke down and put up some new pictures. Be sure to check that last post for pics of my nephew and my folks. The other pics I want to add come from a football game I went to, and there is one from today. The game was UNC vs. Some loser school who beat us. I can't remember...
Anyway, I went to the game with Firstyears Stephen and Jon. It was fun enough depite the loss.
Its hard to get a good low light action shot without a professional camera, but this anit terrible.

I think the quarterback just threw the ball... probably to the wrong team.

There's Steve and Jon (right to left) and our thousands of close friends.
When the Game started to get out of hand, I stepped on the field to lend my assistance:

Here I am. I look a little different in uniform and on camera.... the camera add weight... and pigment?
Then I saw the moon.

I tried to take advantage of my giant zoom.

Then there was today. I passed by a fountain and it was bright enough that I decided to try to get a super quick shutter shot. It worked and here is the result:

I really like this one because I think the droplets look like jewels.
Thats all for now.

In suffolk... Happy Birthday Cody!--updated

I got to go out on my folks boat today. It was pretty choppy out there, so we spent 3 minutes boating and 25 minutes trying to get the boat back on the trailer. We finally met the challenge.
Here's my folks! Quite a handsome set you might say...

Captain Dad. Retired Lt. Cmdr. (in the navy for real)


I am home to celebrate the birthday of my soon to be 4 year old nephew. Cody is a cute kid.

Cody-- the power ranger!

Somewhat of a brat, but who wasn't a bit of a brat at that age. My parents say that K-4 is helping him to mature. Thats cool. I racked my brain for a while trying to think of something cool that i could get him for his birthday. He has lots of toys, and I didn't want to get him just another toy you know? I had the thought of getting him a rubix cube. I thought, "he'll have fun just screwing around with it, and then one day he'll realize that its a puzzle and maybe it will help him with problem solving skills... " something like that. I don't know. I haven't gotten him anything yet. If you know what a 4 year old just HAS to have, then you let me know. I know that a rubix cube is too advanced for him, by the way, but that was part of the idea anyway. I'm always doing that. When he was two, I got him the chronicles of narnia for Christmas. I really got it for his parents to read to him, but I think that it would probably be a more appropriate gift now...! wait ! thats it! I will find those books and give them to him again! Its not like they even opened them yet right? It will be funny to me to see if they figure out that I already gave these to him. Even better, I will take a BUNCH of his old toys and wrap them and re-give them to him. I'll probably do this until he gets wise. Alright then. leave suggestions.

The Exciting Concrusion...

Posting in Engrish. Behold December...

Not that you care...

But I am planning on posting something somtime. I have been really busy lately. I have even started a few posts that were interupted and left to die in my mind. Soon though... this one doesn't even count.

Do I look any different?

I mean, now that I passed my masters presentation?
Booya.

Nov.

This is extreemly something.... Hmm what word am I tactfully looking for here.... Well I will give you a hint:
It rhymes with "GAY".

October -- 8 times colder than Una-brrr.

hmmm....

Intelegizzle Dizizzle

Everyone keeps throwing in their two cents about ID. Here are mine:

ID offers little in the way of giving a 'how things happened'. ID, if taught, belongs in philosophy over science (at least the way I understand it now). I'm gonna try an analogy here... In the Scientific community we often try to explain the things we don't understand by applying priciples that we do understand. Example: We do see the a process of 'natural selection' which accounts for zebras thriving in africa and not in europe. We see adaption like birds developing better beaks for breaking nuts, or incects becoming resistant to pesticides. We don't observe animals evolving into new animals. We infer this with the fossil record, but convieniently , or unfortunatly, that type of evolution-- 'macro'evolution as it has been termed, is not observable. The process takes SOOOOO long that science will have to be observing for the next million years to document such a case (based on the current evolutionary models). HOwever, our DNA is 96% or more the same as a chimpanzee's -- our 'closest' relative. And nearly all DNA in all living things has some high percentage similarity. This certainly can help the case for macro-evolution. After all, we understand and observe the micro evolutions. Seems perfectly reasonable to apply said knowledge to what we can't observe.
-- I knew this would take a while --
Example 2: Waves require a medium to travel through. Sound, pressure... etc. for a long time every wave we could measure required a medium to travel through. Except light. We could suck the ever-loving everything out of a tube of glass and shine a light right through it. Sound wouldn't go anywhere, but light went right on through. Well, this perplexed us because we knew that light was a electro-magnetic wave. We knew that waves require a medium to travel through... so we came up with 'aether'. Aether was a theoretical mystery fluid that filled all of space and was unable to be detected, but it let us sleep better at night knowing that it allowed for the propagation of light through space and such. Aether stuck around for a long time. If you look, you can find old physics texts which tell you all about aether physics. How it makes science work the way we expect. Only, there is no aether. Some guys (michealson and morley) were clever enough to devise an experiment in which to measure the speed of light very precicely at different times of year when the earth was at different locations in space so that the aether, haveing some prefered direction, could be detected. Their results were that light speed is constant etc. The scientific comminity fought with the absense of aether for some time. We now don't think that light needs a medium to travel through. We now think lots of things differently than we did 100 years ago. And 100 Years from now, we'll think differently.
ID as proposed in 'darwins black box'(Behe) suggest that based on what we (science) now understand is happening at the bio-chemical level, darwinian evolution is highly improbable. His claims are based on an understanding of the model of darwinian evolution and bio-chemical processes. Its not like his argument is "science is hard. God made it!" His argument is (if I may) Darwinian evolution appears to be unable to explain what is going on in the former 'black box' of living cells. SO... using evidence to refute evolution is NOT (neccessarily) a good argument for ID. It shouldn't make anyone get too defensive. Either his claims hold wieght, or they don't. No one should be afraid of the truth.

Its been a while since an actual update....

Hey everybody. Its been a while since I just said what was goin on with me, so now I will. I have a masters presentation coming up in a week and I am a little nervous about it. So basically I just have to give a talk about a double polarization compton scattering experiment. We want to scatter 100% circularly polarized 140 MeV photons off polarized 3He nuclei because such an experiment is sensitive to 'spin polarizabilities'. The 'spin polarizability' of a nucleon is a fundamental property of a nucleon like mass, or charge, only, it is much more difficult to measure. Anyway, i could go on and bore you to death with all the details of the experiment, but I won't just yet. This is what I spend all day either thinking about, or trying not to think about.
In other news, I am auditing a 'social dance' class, and a spanish conversation class. Hopefully committing to these classes will not be so difficult after giving this talk.
My scooter has been out of comission for some time now, forcing me to use my bike and the bus. The bike/bus combination is exceedingly efficient, and in Chapel hill it is free, so I can't complain too much. My scooter is currently being worked on by my dad in suffolk. Godspeed dad.
More ironing soon...

September, I barely know her!

Take into account that he had to climb up there with a iron and ironing borad...

August. Yep... no pun there.

This could possibly be the most extreem ironing ever done.

not.

I wanted the truth, but July-ed to me.

I know, I know. Im pushing it.

Ice Cream Relief

Hey everyone. For anyone local who looks at this, I wanted you to be aware of a way you can give to those sending relief to victims of Katrina. Monday (labor day) Maple View Farms with locations located in Chapel Hill and Carrboro will be donating all the proceeds from ice cream sales to Katrina relief. Not all the profits, all the proceeds. Workers will be volenteering time, and Maple View is dontating all the ice cream. Its ice cream for a good cause. Eat up, tell your friends, tell your enemies, and do more.

F***ing, Austria

this is a real town in Austria. The Sign says "please, not so fast!"