12.23.05

Are all projects this way?

Posted in Programming at 1:18 am by Todd

This blog entry certainly rings true for me. Is it possible that this disconnect is avoidable?

12.22.05

How State of Fear Changes my Perception

Posted in Books at 2:30 am by Todd

I assume that most families behave similar to mine and celebrate multiple holidays. For example, I just had the first of (at least) 3 Christmas celebrations this weekend when we were supposed to have my sister’s family and my dad and his girlfriend over. Things did not work out as we had planned (too much snow to drive on Saturday) so Kari and I celebrated with my father and his girlfriend Jesse Ann.

So, to make that long boring paragraph meaningful, I just wanted to point out that I just received a few new books that look to be very exciting and meaningful to read from my father. I am starting off with Micheal Crichton’s State of Fear. It is amazing how his writing can cause me to change the way I view the world. In this case, it has made me look at what researchers publish and what can influence the results. Let me explain a little more.

Like a lot of people, I watch the evening news for snippets of worldly events. Sometimes they come on with stories about breakthroughs in science that come from research. The problem that I see with how they cover them is that they take a particular slant to it since: 1) it is hard to provide enough detail to provide real understanding and be interesting in a 20 second story, and 2) it is likely that the people that reported the event did not truly understand the research and the implications of that research. However, this is not my point. My point is, what if the scientist that did the work was influenced in some way to put a particular slant on the data or theory?

To provide a little more specific example, the book goes into some detail about a visit that a wealthy philanthropist, George Morton takes to visit a scientist doing research on the glaciers in Iceland. Traveling with Morton are his attorney, Mr. Evans, and an “old friend”, Mr. Drake, who runs an environmental organization (think Green Peace). When they arrive Mr. Drake starts to chat with the scientist about his current set of findings and provides some “suggestions” on how to write up the data. The book makes it seem like Mr. Drake wants the scientist to soften the data he found to help spin it to support Mr. Drake’s claims about global warming.

So, for a long time I have had the illusion that scientists publish the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But this book has changed my view because this does not seem like pure-fiction to me. I can imagine that this type of thing actually occurs in science today (and probably has happened well into the past). And this makes me wonder about the things that I read in scientific publications.

But I suppose that this is what everyone already knows and already looks at these as less than fact.

As a side note, this isn’t the first of Crichton’s books that has done this. Most of the books that he has written (or rather, those that I have read) have provided the same type of insight into the world. So thank you Mr. Crichton for writing interesting and somewhat educational books.

Free Rant Repository

Posted in Programming, SAnToS at 1:36 am by Todd

I just ran across a great resource that all should use and possibly contribute to. Not sure if the author had this in mind when he created it, but I think it should turn into something like wikipedia where everyone can contribute to make it better. It is truly one of the great web pages (blog entries) of all time.

And without further ado, the link.

I am planning on using at least one of these rants everyday in an effort to increase my rant-cabulary (sort of like those vocabulary calendars that provide you a word of the day).

12.20.05

Languages: Freedom -v- Safety

Posted in Programming at 12:50 am by Todd

Found an interesting blog entry during my normal blog browsing time. It lays out a way to think about languages to put the classic “my language is better than your language” debate into some context. I don’t think that the article is earth-shattering but it is a well written description and it has provided me a nice, clear view of how to look at languages. Maybe it will help me communicate to others why I like certain languages and language features. So, I figured I would link to it and hope others find it interesting as well.

BTW, this description was found while looking at some rants surrounding something James Gosling was saying about scripting languages. In some ways, an interesting debate, in others, it just boils down to the classic vi v emacs religious debate in which nobody wins and everyone loses.

12.16.05

Congrats to Ben

Posted in Family, SAnToS at 1:08 am by Todd

Just wanted to publicly congratulate Ben Dolezal on his great final exhibition. He did a great job on it all and really deserves the awards that he received.

I just wish he didn’t have to graduate so that we could continue paying him slave wages for his great work.

Coffee, it truly makes you crazy

Posted in SAnToS at 1:00 am by Todd

During my normal day, I spend at least 30 minutes looking through various blogs of related researchers and people working on projects/products/technologies that I find useful at work. Today, I ran across a great story written by a grad student at UMass (this student’s group works closely with ours). I just had to share it.

So it got me to wonder what things I do, in the name of research, that are crazy?