I'm not sure what prompted this, but last night I got to thinking about how I always refer to this as my website, and never a blog. I could refer to it as such if I wanted to. I write posts about whatever I feel like, tag them, let people comment on them; if this wasn't my site it would sound like a blog to me.



I think it's because of all the time I put into actually creating the site, and writing the code. That definitely shadows the amount of time I've spent writing real content, and that doesn't sound very bloggy to me. Does it matter at all? Of course not, just in my head.

If I search Will and Beyond, I only get 10 results (this would be the 11th). I read through those, and they consist of two things, 1) me referring to other blogs, and 2) the Will and Beyond LiveBlogging system.

It's crazy to think how popular the term has become though. The term is derived from web log. Here are some Google search stats:

blog - 3,520,000,000 results found
weblog - 173,000,000 results found
"web log" - 18,000,000 results found

That's all I really had to say.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.

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

Dianna: there are 5 oceans
Will: pacific, atlantic, indian, arctic
Will: what's the 5th?
Dianna: southern

I was lied to my entire life. Well, sort of. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) decided in 2000 that this ocean existed. They chose 60 degrees south (latitude), and made any water south of that into the Southern Ocean. They stole from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans!



It's not even the smallest Ocean, it's the 4th largest. Imagine being the Arctic Ocean, you hear that they are creating a new ocean. 'Yeah! I'm not longer low man on the totem pole, now someone else is the smallest ocean!' But no, they even made it larger than the Arctic Ocean; I'd be pissed.

Do other people know about this ocean? Am I the only ignorant one? Let's check out some Google results.

"indian ocean" - about 51,700,000 results
"pacific ocean" - about 14,100,000 results
"atlantic ocean" - about 10,700,000 results
"arctic ocean" - about 1,990,000 results
"southern ocean" - about 1,930,000 results

I feel some relief that it has the least results, but look at how close the Southern and Arctic Oceans' results are. Still somewhat insulting to the Arctic; look at how much seniority it has.

Here's a quote from Wikipedia:
"by 1723 mapmakers such as Johann Homann featured an extensive "Oceanus Septentrionalis" at the northern edge of their charts."



Oh wow, only 277 years of seniority. Well let's look at some more Google results.

"five oceans" - about 60,100 results
"5 oceans" - about 126,000 results
"four oceans" - about 36,600 results
"4 oceans" - about 156,000 results

Overall, five oceans has 186,100 results, and four oceans has 192,600 results, so that's really close.

I polled some people via AIM and here some of the excerpts:

Will: off the top of your head, how many oceans are there?
Chris: ...three
Chris: no, four
Will: that's what i thought
Will: for the last 8 years there's been 5
Chris: indian, pacific, arctic, atlantic
Will: they fucking made an ocean
Chris: what?
Will: it's blowing my mind
Will: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ocean
Chris: which ocean was made?
Chris: what the fuck is this?
Will: in 2000 they just fucking decided
Chris: that's quite angering

Will: off the top of your head, how many oceans are there?
Dustin: 5
Will: what the hell, there are only supposed to be four
Will: i just discovered there's a fifth, and i'm pissed
Dustin: pacific, atlantic, indian, arctic, and damn it, whats the other
Will: southern
At least he couldn't think of the fifth; I feel a little better I suppose.

Will: i want to know what % of population thinks we have 4 oceans
Roy: I'm sure you'll get 7 as the most common response
Will: that's seven seas
Roy: but you're assuming the average person will differentiate between seas and oceans

Will: off the top of your head, how many oceans are there?
Jared: 4
Will: yeah, exactly
Will: but wait, no, there's five
Will: they CREATED an ocean!
Jared: indian, atlantic, pacific, arctic
Will: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ocean
Jared: what?
Jared: this was in the second edition of Limits of Oceans and Seas and no wished to mention to us when we were young
Jared: ridiculous
Will: yeah, really, how dare they

I am not of a fan of the IHO; how could they do this to me. I lost sleep over this.

Some resources I used to help blow my mind:
Wikipedia
Enchanted Learning
About.com
The CIA World Handbook

[Comments: 0] [Tags: ranting]

So, can you tell me what the above image is missing? That's the game I was playing when I walked up to my bike. Some asshole stole the front wheel off of it. I had some special safety device, where you needed a special tool (sort of an allen wrench with a hole drilled in it) to remove the wheel. The frame and back wheel were locked by a Kryptonite U-lock.

This apparently wasn't good enough, since they managed to take it anyway. So, I reported it to campus security and went to the bike shop to get another wheel and a better lock for the front. If I ever see a guy walking around with my wheel (yeah, right), I'm going to beat the hell out of him until $84 falls out. Not a pleasant surprise when I wanted to go home.

Jailu informed me that I should have at least recreated the below image.



I agree with her.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed. (Unless you're a bike thief, then no godspeed for you.)

[Comments: 0] [Tags: ranting]

This is really getting out of hand. We are just putting the term 'nano' in front of anything. 'Hey! That TEM image looks kinda like an amphibian of some sort... Let's put the word nanotoad in our paper!' This is by no means a complete list, but here are just some of the terms which are being used. The references I include aren't necessarily the first to use the term; I don't feel like doing all that extra searching.

I'm starting out with some normal, acceptable ones before I get into the weird ones.

Nanoparticle (doi: 10.1038/nbt1100)
This was one of the first terms used, and is perfectly acceptable.

Nanocrystal (doi: 10.1002/anie.200705806)
Nothing special about this one, fairly boring term. Could be replaced with nanoparticle in some cases, but it's fine.

Nanosphere (doi: 10.1021/ja028650l)
Most nanoparticles are nanospheres, but I suppose this is a more descriptive term.



Nanotube (doi: 10.1021/nl0804295)
With a title like: "Synthesis of High Aspect-Ratio Carbon Nanotube “Flying Carpets” from Nanostructured Flake Substrates", I was really disappointed to not find the term "nano-flying carpet".

Nanorod (doi: 10.1021/ic8000416)
Nothing wrong with this one, it's descriptive and reasonable enough.

Nanowire (doi: 10.1126/science.1157131)
In this paper, they were so close to saying the phrase 'nanotree'; I appreciate them not, but not for the purpose of this article.

Nanoislands (doi: 10.1002/adma.200701383)
Nanoislands are usually just the source of nanorods, (or nanowires...) but do they really need a name?

Nanorice (doi: 10.1002/adma.200701782)
Another term which could be replaced with nanorod. From the image below, I see how that makes you think of rice, but it's still a nanorod!



Nano-whiskers (doi: 10.1063/1.1418446)
How many different ways do we need to say nanorod???

Nano-checkerboard (doi: 10.1021/cm800473m)
I admittedly didn't read this too carefully, but playing a game of nanocheckers or chess was never brought up. Sad.



Nanomedicine (doi: 10.1038/nnano.2008.114)
I imagine that this is about the science of healing Keebler elves. This is actually a picture of snap, crackle, and pop; are they the same thing as the Keelber elves?



Nano-horn (doi: 10.1016/S0009-2614(99)00642-9)
Nano-aggregate
Look at the picture below, would you call that a horn? I suppose there's a resemblance, but there really is no need for this term. And nano-aggregate? Why not just aggregate; the term aggregate doesn't necessarily apply only to the macroscale. Two unnecessary 'nanoterms' in one paper, sigh.



Nanomanipulation (doi: 10.1038/nnano.2008.114)
In this article, they use 'molecular cranes' to manipulate things on the nanoscale. The lack of pictures makes me sad.

Nanotweezers (doi: 10.1126/science.286.5447.2148)
A nice follow to nanomanipulation.



Nanolithography (doi: 10.1126/science.286.5439.523)
Nano-Plotter
C'mon! Firstly, I see no use for this, but secondly... nanolithography... ugh.



Nanochannels (doi: 10.1002/adma.200701490)
I suppose this one's okay, but it still doesn't sit right with me.

Nanodiamond (doi: 10.1038/nnano.2008.99)
'Will you marry me?' *opens ring box*
'Uhhh... is that an empty ring?'
'No, silly; it has a nanodiamond!'

Nano-HPLC (doi: 10.1021/ac000497v)
Great, now the 'nanoterms' have moved from materials chemistry to analytical, swell.

Honorable Mention (ref: Newsvine)
Unfortunately it's just called a microscopic noodle bowl, and not nanonoodles.



Maybe I'll write a follow up to this, there are certainly more terms I could pull up, but for now I'm too annoyed to go on.

Godspeed.

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

I learned how to use the furnace for thermal decomposition today. I let it run for a while. Unfortunately, I didn't factor in the fact it's cooling from 950 degrees Celsius into my going home timeframe. It's been like an hour and a half now...

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: ranting, science, lab pictures]

For this week’s Techy Tuesday, I will be reviewing a purchase I made a couple of month’s ago from Woot.com, the Razer Pro|Type Multimedia Keyboard with iPod Dock (but no, I did not pay this much for it). I bought it because I wanted a keyboard I could move around apart from my laptop, because it had a built-in iPod dock, and it had keys which could be assigned to macros; all in all, some excellent features.

The keyboard was pretty high quality, it felt nice and solid, although it was pretty big. Its size was due to it having macro keys on both sides of the regular keyboard, in addition to other useful keys, such as play/pause/rewind/etc. for use with a media player, as well as zoom/rotate buttons for image manipulation, as well as some nice shortcut keys.



Additionally, you could setup multiple profiles; the macro and shortcut keys would have different uses in different profiles. A really nice feature was that you could set the software to auto-switch to different profiles when different programs were loaded up. As you see in the picture above, there were pretty bright blue lights on it. You may have noticed that this review has been in the past tense; that is intentional. Enough with the positive aspects, time to show you its flaws.

The Macro Keys/Profiles:
Very nice idea, but poor implemented. There are a maximum of 8 keys per macro, and they go very slowly, without the ability to adjust the speed. An eight key macro would take about 2-3 seconds to perform. Profiles are nice, but without good macro keys, it’s not that great of a feature, especially when the profile switching can take up to 10 seconds to recognize a program is active.

Durability:
It’s a keyboard, so you shouldn’t really have to worry about it being mistreated. I treated mine well, but did it return the favor? I will use the keyboard itself to write this next paragraph.

Well, as you can see, hee ae some eos. You can' quie ead eeyhin ha I'm ypin, ecause no all o he keys work anymore. There is no real consistency - sometimes keys work, and sometimes they don't; you can see this in the past line. In fact, this is the best the keyboard has performed in a while, which is nice, but not so good for proving my point. I'll continue, and hope that the keyboard stops working, as strange as that may sound. Well, damn - I could go through and cheat by removing random characters, but I'd feel bad about that. Regardless, it's useless unless it can consistently type all of the characters.

The customer service blows. I sent them two emails. The first email, they responded to. I was complaining about the macro stuff that I wrote about above. They essentially said, yeah, that’s how it is; you can’t change it. The second email I sent was about the consistency that I spoke of above. That email is below:

Hi,

I saw that there is a two-year limited warranty on your products. I purchased a RazerPro Keyboard (the one with the iPod dock) in December and it has stopped working properly. Not all of the keys work properly (I am typing this from the laptop directly rather than the keyboard).

The following keys no longer function: b, f, g, r, s, t, v, w, x, backspace, 2, 4, 5. Possibly others as well. Occasionally some of those work, (and probably some others don't work at other times), however as you can imagine, this is no longer able to be used.

How do I go about getting this replaced?

Thanks!

They didn’t respond. My response to their lack of response is below. This also summarizes my review of their product.



I wish I had read more reviews. Maybe I can make this into a snake?

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: technology, techy tuesday, ranting]

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 (last year's is here), 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]

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]

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]

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, ranting]

Well, the semester is over, and it's time to head home for a couple of weeks. I'm writing this from my phone in the airport (the free Wifi is down). I left from DC an hour and a half late, but that was okay because I had a 5 hour layoover here at JFK. Unfortunately, instead of just subtracting from my layover time here, all flights leaving JFK are about 4 hours late. So I'll be arriving at 2:20am instead of 11pm. Thanks to the Micahs for giving me a ride since someone blew a red light and totalled Aunt Sue's car yesterday.

Look for more Will and Beyond updates throughout the Christmas break.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: ranting]

The above picture is what they call a "CAT Scan" of a section of the earth. Basically you send measure the speed and distance that seismic waves move through land. Combining a large amount of data yielded the above. The colored sections are places where the speed was measured to be faster than normal and the waves traveled farther than usual. Why would this be? Well on the outer edge of the circle, there is ocean. Waves move faster through and farther in water. So from this we can determine that there is water where there is color. Okay, great, except, do you notice anything weird? Well, there is water... underground.

The article which I read this from was entitled: "Massive New Ocean Discovered Deep Inside Earth's Interior". Wow, an underground ocean. This is from a science/tech site called the Daily Galaxy. I get their feed delivered to my RSS reader. It's generally good stuff, however this is unacceptable.

Why is this unacceptable? Let's go to their source; a press release from Washington University in St. Louis. The story here is entitled: "3-D seismic model of vast water reservoir revealed". If you read the Daily Galaxy article, you are lead to believe that they discovered an underwater ocean! However, this quote is found in the WashU press release: "If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean's worth of water."

There is a major difference between "underground ocean" and "rock that holds some water". Please note, that I am not knocking the science here, just the way it was presented by the Daily Galaxy. They do include the quote: "The researchers estimate that up to 0.1 percent of the rock sinking down into the Earth's mantle in that part of the world is water, which works out to about an Arctic Ocean's worth of water." In my opinion, that's insufficient, it does not clearly state what is taking place here. How could this have been done better you may ask. Let's move on to National Geographic. Their article is entitled: "Huge Underground "Ocean" Found Beneath Asia", similar to that of the article from the Daily Galaxy. I appreciate that the word 'ocean' is in quotes, but the key difference here is the article itself. I quote from the fifth line:

"But nobody will be exploring this sea by submarine. The water is locked in moisture-containing rocks 400 to 800 miles (700 to 1,400 kilometers) beneath the surface.

It isn't an ocean. [The water] is a very low percentage [of the rock], probably less than 0.1 percent."

Science writing is important, it lets people who don't spend their lives working in science understand what's happening in the science world. However, we must realize that people doing "science writing" are essentially acting as translators. It is very important that the message is not skewed! Before I read the source, I was left with the impression that we discovered a new ocean!

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