Well, I did it - my first year of graduate school is behind me. I wouldn't really call myself a second year at this point, but I'm not going to think of myself as a first year during the summer. I'll have to think up something to call myself. I definitely enjoyed myself throughout the semester. There are obviously ups and downs, but more ups. Not having to teach or take classes this summer will be excellent.



I do have a legitimate concern, however. First semester, I gave two presentations. Second semester, I have eight. Some of these were not a big deal, but a few were pretty lofty. The graph you see here is what's going to happen if this trend continues. I figured out there were 108 days in first semester, and 116 in second. At this rate, the number of presentations I'll be giving will surpass the number of days in the semester by my fourth semester. I initially had the graph last for all 10 semesters, but it was hard to read, so here is the full table:



Hopefully once I get some more data points, things will change, because this sounds terrifying.

Because of all of these presentations and papers and whatnot, I have done a ton of literature reading through the semester, so over the course of summer I'll do a little Research Blogging, because whether or not you actually read my journal posts or not, I did that work so I might as well get a Will and Beyond post out of it.

Next Saturday (May 17th) is the 2nd Annual Great Manhattan Perimeter Walk, so in case you're not on Facebook, and haven't heard me otherwise speak of it, you should come - contact me if interested. That's about it for now, so adios.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: ranting]

In an attempt to make sure I do more work on Will and Beyond, I'm going to try and do a weekly column: Techy Tuesday. It will be up at some point on Tuesday every week. (East coast time.) I haven't decided on any sort of strict formula for this, and I don't think I will, but it will be techy related.

NES Hacking



Everyone remember their days of NES. Unless you're too young. Or you were deprived as a child. But really, if you didn't have any friends growing up who had one, you were too sheltered, where was your ambition?

Anyhow, the image you see is someone putting an entire NES system in a cartridge. See that indention in the middle? That's where you put the game - yes, a cartridge in a cartridge. The obvious question is what happens when you get two and put them in each other - maybe they make little Game Boys?



Now here is someone putting the NES in a controller. This one's cool because not only does it have a cartridge slot in the back, it comes with 70 games built-in to it. If you have any moral qualms with using emulators and ROMs, then go away stick with that first mod. I wish I had this kind of talent.

Geeky Jewelery



In case you're having troubles declaring your geekdom, here are a couple options. The first option will only work for men. (Because women don't wear cufflinks, right?) I'm not a fan of most cufflinks, I'm usually satisfied with just the buttons that come on the shirt, but for these Wiimote cufflinks, I'd make an exception. They look like they are really well done.



Finally, we have a pair of ethernet wedding rings. In case any of you are getting married, give it some thought. I pitched it to Micah to use these for his, but I wouldn't put money on it. Just imagine, as you kiss the bride, when you lean in, you could connect them, and your geekiness would be immortalized.

That's it. I'll work to get this up every week, and we'll see how this goes. If you have any suggestions (or especially if you want to write a column of your own), feel free to contact me. (webmaster @ the website name)

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: technology, video games, techy tuesday]

Pandora and Last.fm are two amazing online music services which I utilize and love. I'll talk a bit about each.



Pandora is a music service which streams music from the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project analyzes songs and attempts to classify them, similar to music fingerprinting. It assigns different variables such as "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony." The way it works on Pandora is that you type in a song or artist you like. Pandora will then select that song, look up it's attributes, and create a radio station based on these. It will then play songs with similar attributes (or 'genes'). As you play music, you're able to give songs thumbs up and thumbs down, and you will be customizing your station as you listen.



Last.fm takes a more social stance on internet radio. As you listen to music, tracks are 'scrobbled' your profile. You're able to see what tracks you have listened to, and charts are created to show you your listening habits. As you add friends on Last.fm, you're able to see what they are listening to, recommend music, and see what your music compatibility is with them. You're able to listen to music from the site directly, or install a plugin on your computer to scrobble music from iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. It has some other nice features such as finding concerts in your area that you would like based on your preferences.



And here's the best part. Real-ity created Pandora.fm. It is a mashup of Pandora and Last.fm. You're able to listen to your Pandora stations and have the tracks scrobble to your Last.fm account. There are Firefox plugins which allow you to scrobble to Last.fm as well, however, Pandora.fm is nice because you can use it without downloading anything. This is what I use in lab primarily.

If you have any questions, let me know, but otherwise enjoy the music. If you use Last.fm already, feel free to add me as a friend.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: music]

I discovered a really interesting site ten days ago. It's called One Million Monkeys Typing. The name comes from the idea that if you put a million monkeys in a room with typewriters, they'll eventually pump out the work of Shakespeare. The way the site works is that someone creates the first part of a story. This becomes the trunk. People then write additions to the story, a maximum of three different branches are possible. Then each of these branches are added onto, and it can again split into three. You're able to vote on branches, and weak branches will be voted off and deleted.



I started doing a little writing on the site myself; I think it's a lot of fun. It's nice because it's the sort of thing you can spend ten minutes on here and there, which fits in well with my currently busy schedule. It actually reminded me of the One Line Stories that Willipedia used to have - those were also fun. Anyway, let me know if anyone decides to start writing on the site.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2]

May 8th: just 23 more days to go. (This is assuming I can count.) I despise how all the real work for classes piles up at the end - I would much rather one or two things a week for a whole semester rather than 30 or 40 things all the same damn time. I've been trying to stay on top of things, and fairly successfully somehow (no fun, no sleep, actually), but the wall is steadily approaching. The downside is that I'm getting tired and losing motivation...



A motivation board like this would be good - well no, it would just distract me more, but I would enjoy it nonetheless. Literature seminars are this weekend - I'm not stressing over it, but I'm also not looking forward to it. The weekend after I'm going to go to New York to see Alex play, and to play some hide and seek. Then back to the grind - need to take a weekend off though.

Being able to just do research in the summer will be really nice - I can motivate myself fine for my own purposes. Well, I only have to take one more class, ever, so the first year business is coming to an end. Time to take another stab at motivating myself...

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: ranting]

About 7 months ago, I mentioned that Demonoid was being shut down. The canadians actually shut them down - the CRIA. They threatened Demonoid's hosting provider, and that was the end. Bad times - it had a huge amount of torrents, and lots of obscure stuff that you couldn't find in most other places.



An article from TorrentFreak popped into my news reader and informed me that it was back. Just thought I'd share the news in case you hadn't heard.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: file sharing]

A few months ago, I was doing some reading on The Daily Galaxy, and I came across an artist named Mike Libby. Below you see an example of one of his pieces of art. The specific piece you see here costs $700 and comes in a glass dome; but what is it?

"Insect Lab is an artist studio that customizes real insects with antique watch parts and mechanical components."
I love it. It's unfortunately outside of my price range as a graduate student, but someday... Even though I can't afford it, I'd still like to see it in person. He was at CRAFTBOSTON in (you guessed it) Boston a couple of weeks ago, but his News and Events pages doesn't have any other upcoming events. I'll keep an eye on it. (Though I'll have to remember to check manually, since there's no RSS feed....)



Photo: Insect Studio

Godspeed.

[Comments: 1] [Tags: art]

The pirates of the new age. No longer plundering the seas and robbing merchant ships, but plundering the internet and robbing copyright holders. I definitely have no problem with them. In fact, I partake in these activities. I take no part in such activities, however I enjoy following the news. That's why Torrent Freak is one of the feeds in my RSS reader. In an article that was published earlier today, they talk about how hundreds of computer systems in the South Austrailian police branch contained pirated movies. This should set a precedent for pirating being okay down under, right? I say this because of the quote, "police sources have told press that there will not be any investigation into this, citing the large numbers of police officers involved." The thought of a bunch of police being arrested reminded me of the ending of The Bank Job, with Jason Statham that is apparently based on a true story.



Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: file sharing]

Three months off in the summer? Who thought this up? I started thinking about it, and my first thought was that it must have to do with farming, since it seems like a once useful, yet now outdated idea (as is daylight savings time). However, that wouldn't make much sense, because I thought harvests were in the fall and spring. I looked into it, and apparently school used to be held in two 3 month sessions during summer and winter. That obviously would not work nowadays, but that makes more sense than summer vacation for those times.

Then from that same article, I read that students would only attend school for 6 months or so anyway, so they cut down the calendar accordingly. What? I would like to know how that worked - I'm picturing a revolution rising within a school with one brave fifth grader leading marches out of the school until the administration gave up. It's every schoolchild's dream. Wikipedia was mostly useless on the subject - they only suggested that it was so schools would have time to clean and such. 3 months of cleaning, I don't buy it. Now I'm quoting from that article in Slate: "1) Poorly ventilated school buildings were nearly unbearable during heat waves. 2) Community leaders fretted that hot, crowded environments facilitated the spread of disease. 3) Wealthy urbanites traditionally vacationed during the hottest months, and middle-class school administrators were following in their footsteps."



That's a reasonable explanation. However, those times are over, health is always an issue, but it's far far from the level at which it used to be, and A/C is pretty much standard everywhere. I've heard of the suggestion for year round school which does 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off. Some places even do that. Then I came across the idea of rotating that 3 month break through the seasons. That way, across the span of 4 years, you would have had a vacation in each of the seasons. That seems reasonable, but very hard to implement.

To be honest, I really just thought all of this up because of my desire to take winters off and snowboard the entire time. Man, that would be good times.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: ranting]

Back in some techy engineering'ish class I took in high school, we got to make a Rube Goldberg machine. It was a good time. I don't remember how many steps it had - probably 15 or so. The idea was to put toothpaste onto a toothbrush. I forget how it started, but I know it ended with dominoes falling onto a rat trap, which pulled out pegs from underneath a brick, which landed on the toothpaste tube. It was a lot of fun.

It was far less impressive than the 156 steps that a team at Purdue used to assemble a hamburger. On the other hand, we didn't spend about 5,000 man hours on it.



Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: food, technology]

The title is a bit misleading - it's really a mix of two different things, so if you were expecting to see pale, eerie, floating vaginas, you're fucked up this isn't the article for you.



I was going through my RSS reader, and the following article popped out at me: Kidney Extracted Through The Vagina, First Time In Europe, Second In World. If that isn't one of the strangest images you've thought of, you have a twisted imagination. The idea is that you can reduce the amount of recovery time required, and scarring by going through the babyhole. Normally, you end up making a 6 cm incision, however with this method, you only need two smaller, 1 cm incisions. Oh wait, "Furthermore, another non visible incision is done in the internal part of the vagina, where the kidney is extracted." How is this a good idea??? To be fair, they're doing this to a 66 year old woman, so she probably doesn't get quite as much use out of it, but c'mon.



This is the image I was about to use, but then I saw the first image, and it fit better with the title. Earlier, I made a post about Nine Inch Nails' new album, Ghosts I. At the time, I had only downloaded for free, Ghosts I. A few days later I paid the $5 and downloaded Ghosts II-IV. I really enjoyed it. One of the feeds in my RSS reader is Pitchfork Media. They review music, so it helps me keep up with what's new, and if an album gets above an 8.0, I'll usually... acquire it. I was shocked to see that they gave Ghosts I-IV a 5.0. I disagree strongly with this, however there was a line in there which is very true. "Reznor stands to make millions from Ghosts, something that certainly wouldn't have been true if he'd released this two-hour 4xCD instrumental work on a major label." Anyhow, that's it for now.

Photo 1: Flickr
Photo 2: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: music, science]

I went snowboarding at Stratton up in Vermont this weekend. It was a good time. I went with Dianna and Yan through Ski Klub International. (By the way, I can't believe that I actually just linked to a Geocities site.) Sadly, that was my only trip for the whole season - oh well, I'll make up for it next season. I took some pictures, and I'll put them up sometime this week - probably towards the end of it; things are really busy.

Grad school is piling up with work, which unfortunately gets in the way of sleep. I'm enjoying it and all, but I'd enjoy it more if there was a little less of it at times. I guess that's what it takes though...



I found this Portal wallpaper, and it'll stick 'til I find something better or I get bored with it. So fun. More updates to come later this week.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: video games]

Everyone, I just think you should know, you're making Dr. Celestino very sad. He sits at home in his medical office awaiting your questions so he can spread his professional advice, but people don't come. Let's get the ball rolling people. I am suggesting an Easter theme to the questions, but you don't have to stick to that. He hasn't answered a single question in more than 10 months. We don't want him to get rusty.

Submit your questions to me or him via email, in the comments on this post, or (ideally) in the "submit a question" section at the bottom of any Ask Dr. Celestino column.



Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2]

Things have been busy, and are getting busier, so I don't really have time for any Will and Beyond'ing for a little bit. I'll try and post a little here and there, but don't expect anything elaborate. The 3rd annual Union Square Pillow Fight was on Saturday.



I'll put my pictures up here later, for now you can go see them on Flickr. You can also take a look at my pictures from last year. Gotta get back to work; adios for now.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: events, new york]

Do you somehow not have enough distractions in your life? Well then I have good news for you! If you have the internet (well, you are reading this...) and Facebook, yet somehow manage to stay focused, I have the solution to end any unwanted productivity.



Here is the link to install the Scrabulous application onto your Facebook account. You should challenge me to a game; I usually have quite a few games going at once, and I'll make my moves when I'm in the mood to procrastinate. (A lot.) When selecting which image to use for this post, I had quite a few options, but only one had sex on the board, so it was the winner.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: video games]

I'm definitely not sold on global warming one way or the other. I don't think there's enough data to rule it out or prove it, but I do think research should continue. I'm not so sure I would sue Al Gore over it, though the idea is entertaining. I bring this up because I came across a 2006 paper from the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, "Atmospheric Field Measurements of the Hydroxyl Radical Using Laser-Induced Fluorescence Spectroscopy". I found this in search of a paper to write about for my dynamics class, and I think I'll use it.



For the most part, I enjoyed the paper, which is surprising given the amount of analytical and physical chemistry within. To say the least, they are far from my favorite subjects (even though I'm taking both this semester...). It also led me to discover the MCM; the Master Chemical Mechanism, which I spent some time browsing and was pretty impressed with.

I have a few criticisms here, the first of which being they're trying to write a novel. Here's what I mean:
p. 193: "The most important of these intermediates is the hydroxyl radical (OH), which is generated mostly in the daytime as a result of ozone photolysis to form electronically excited oxygen atoms, O(¹D), which react rapidly with water vapor to form OH."
p. 210: "The main contributor to OH initiation in both summer and winter is the reaction between O₃ and alkenes." ... "The fraction of OH initiation from O₃ + alkenes is approximately double that from the O(¹D) + H₂O reaction in the summer, but 100 times greater in the winter.
p. 212: "The largest source of OH by far is the reaction of HO₂ + NO, and thus OH levels reflect the rate of carbonyl photolysis, which occurs at longer wavelengths and thus is still significant in winter."

They're trying to guide us through the path in which they discovered things (I think), but it doesn't seem appropriate in the way they are writing things. My other criticism is that they talk about global warming without mentioning it's a theory. I know some people think that it has progressed beyond being a theory, but they should really be more objective in the scientific literature.

Edit:
Following up Martin's comment, I feel like I should clarify some things. I went through and reread what I have written on this issue, and gave it some thought. Criticizing the article for not referring to global warming is a theory seems rather silly now that I think about it, even though evolution (since it's the example that was used) is a theory, it's not really necessary to refer to as such. As for my personal views on global warming - I stand by that I'm not sold 100% one way or the other, however it's not the fact of whether it's happening that I question, rather the degree to which it's happening. I'm just arguing that people often exaggerate how fast this is taking place.

Heard, D.E. (2006). ATMOSPHERIC FIELD MEASUREMENTS OF THE HYDROXYL RADICAL USING LASER-INDUCED FLUORESCENCE SPECTROSCOPY. Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, 57(1), 191-216. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.physchem.57.032905.104516
Btw, I dislike DOIs that are this long.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 4] [Tags: journals, science]

In my continued search for a paper to do my graduate student literature seminar, I came across this interesting paper.

Published about three weeks ago the web in JACS, researchers at the National University of Singapore have found a way to easily detect mercury in water. The method they are developing is very efficient because it can be performed in the field, without instrumentation, using just the naked eye in about 5 minutes.



Gold nanoparticles (NPs) are functionalized with two different strands of DNA - half of the NPs are functionalized with one strand, the other half with the other. Another strip of DNA twice as long is also added in the mixture. It is designed in a way that this long strip of DNA would not match up with itself, nor will any section of it match up with the two shorter strips that are bound to NPs under normal conditions. However, the system is designed so that the longer strip will bind with the two shorter strips (essentially taping two NPs together) if thymine (the T in GCAT base pair matching) would bind with itself. Mercury has a feature which is rather unique to it, in that it coordinates thymine bases in DNA to one another so that there is a mercury-thymine-mercury connection. Since this is unique to mercury, this method will ignore other metals such as lead, copper, calcium, and many others. The result of this is that nanoparticles will exist as free floating single units in a media which is free of mercury, however, with mercury present the nanoparticles will begin to connect to one another, and form a network, referred to as an aggregate.

Aggregation will show up as a color change. The science behind the color change is that the nanoparticles show a strong UV-Vis (ultraviolet-visible) absorption at a certain wavelength, which varies based on the size of the nanoparticle. This wavelength will change when an aggregate forms, and since color is based on the wavelength of light, this can be observed since these wavelengths are in the range visible to the human eye. Additionally if this aggregate grows large enough (and forms a polymer), precipitation can be observed in the solution.

Unfortunately, the amount of mercury present must be on the micromolar scale, which is a thousand more times more concentrated than the nanomolar scale, which is where the border between the acceptable and unacceptable levels of mercury lies according to the EPA. The current solution to this is to simply boil water down on site, however this does add to the work and time required for detection. This was published in JACS as a communication, and in their conclusion they talk about their plans for future work which would allow detection on a smaller scale by improving upon this method.

Xue, X., Wang, F., Liu, X. (2008). One-Step, Room Temperature, Colorimetric Detection of Mercury (Hg2+) Using DNA/Nanoparticle Conjugates. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 130(11), 3244-3245. DOI: 10.1021/ja076716c

[Comments: 0] [Tags: journals, science]

Zero Punctuation is a weekly video game review... video. I had heard good things about it, but unfortunately I had also seen the logo for it (seen below). As you can tell, not so focused on the art. Especially with webcomics, if I don't like the art, I'm not going to read it, regardless of how funny it is (examples: Penny Arcade and Cyanide and Happiness). However, after weeks of ignoring it, I decided to give it a chance.



I started out with the first game on the list that I have played, Call of Duty 4. I loved it. You can instantly realize why it is entitled Zero Punctuation. I was able to look past the stick figure art, just because it's so funny - that's saying something. I proceeded to watch the reviews for all of the other games I've played more than 5 minutes of: Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Super Paper Mario, and The Orange Box. I highly recommend all of them (I mean the reviews, but the games as well). He (Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw) has been doing this once a week for just over 6 months or so, so there's a decent catalog of reviews to go through.

In summary: funny, short (but not too short) video game reviews read by an Australian (great accents over there).

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: video games]

Before I moved off of Roosevelt Island, I had a ton of leftover food. What to do with it? Let's put it all in a pile, then play Iron Chef! We didn't have a "secret ingredient" that you had to use in all of your dishes, the idea was to just get rid of food. Since I was a college student, the food consisted mostly of things like ramen, macaroni and cheese, and soup. Dianna and I both made 4 dishes, then rated each other based on taste and appearance. She ended up winning.



[Comments: 1] [Tags: food, roosevelt island]

If you look over on the right, you'll notice that it's cleaner than it used to be. The articles button, a couple brilliant buttons, the chatterbox, and the list of archived pages are all gone. The articles button is gone because articles and news have merged into one generic category - the differences that once existed between them had dwindled down to nearly nothing. The chatterbox was slowing down the loading of the page, and it wasn't that great. I'm going to write my own someday soon, in the meantime just use the comments feature - all new pages, and many old, have them. As for the archives - nobody used them. It's shrunk down into a single link, which I'll work on more later.



A long missing feature has finally arrived: search. Before I converted the site to PHP it was never really possible for me to create my own. It has now reached the point where it's possible, so here it is. It's working moderately well for now. It has some restrictions, based on the current setup of the site, but I'm working on expanding it. These are listed in a message which you receive once you input a search. I'm not going to list them here, because they are evolving, and you can see the current limits whenever you do a search. Aside from the restrictions, there are quite a few bugs in it, but give it time.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: will and beyond]