October is for Insecure people.

We used to have a saying in NEK. "I'm not poor, I just have no money."
I was gonna put something together that was optimistic and positive today. And I started thinking about it, and I worked it over in my mind, and then I thought of something. Why I am so god-damn happy this fall?
True, I have days,weeks even, where I bitch and complain because I get frustrated over a computer that I'm building, or I'm bored at work, or I'm trying to meet some girl and things fall apart. But I'm not depressed, upset, or even a little sad. And for every good thing that I tell myself happened this summer, something really bad happend.
My health is great and I am in great shape. I ride my bike 12 miles a day, every day, and am starting to become fairly flexible. Of course, the reason why I ride my bike everywhere is because I was in a three car accident back in. . . June, I think? Maybe end of May? Anyway, car was totaled.
My French and my Russian is getting better. I've had time to hang out at home and chat with people around the world and practice new languages and learn new skills. And I'm eating healthy as well! I had a little garden where I grew some food. Not everything came out well, the potatoes were planted too late and died. Again though, because I had no insurance on my car, and it wasn't registered, I've extra time at home because all the money I make goes to the accident. And eating healthy is cheaper than eating pizza and drinking beer all the time.
My body and mind couldn't be better at this moment in time. Everyday I feel myself growing stronger mentally and physically. When I look at the future, holy crap I can't wait. Math conferences, biology talks, Thanksgiving, Christmas, chances to travel, and the list keeps going on. But to say this summer was crap, well, technically I would be right. My laptop gave me trouble all summer, and finally died on me a couple weeks ago. (I'm typing this on my break at work.) I have had so much more time to read now though, so I finally get to read all the books that have been piling up.
Well, ever have a day where reality suddenly dawns on you? It's not gonna stop me from being awesome, and interesting though. It's really just my excuse why all the things I wanted to get done didn't. Fuck it, though. Shit happens, and the stuff that I really, really want to get done, will get done.
How was your summer? Has life been good to you, or do you simply forget the bad stuff too? Ohhh! Who is doing NaNoWriMo? I'm excited for that and have been putting together my research and stuff for the Non-fiction version of the event.

Damn constraits, we have to break them.

Do we ever stop looking at the future to see possibilities? What is frustrating in this world to me is there doesn't seem to be enough time to fully explore the world around me.
The mathematical models of the world of enzymes and hormone transport systems call to me. I can see a future where florescent chemicals show me the place of penetration and nutrient transfer occur between absucular mychorriazal fungus and the roots of corn. The mysteries of evolutionary theory is worthy of a place in any thriller to me. Plato's world of ideas created by the math of Euclid is a world worth exploring.
I want to spend time in nature, contemplating the structure of the world around me. Time spent in the physical world with real things is time well spent. Theory only describes a poem as lovely as a tree, and cannot replace the smells and sounds of nature.
Mastery of one skill seems to ignore all other skills. The wonders of biology is supported by the foundations of physics. And what about the skills needed to live? The ability to cook, to farm, and to feed oneself? How about the ability to be able to build and to fix? Why is life so large with so many paths?
Why can't I be an expert at everything damnit? I want to be a master lover, thinker, craftsman and artist. If time didn't exist, then I would do it all.

Stupid papers I have to read for work.

I hate you so much right now biochem. You were cute at first with your words that made you sound so smart and brilliant, but these papers I have to read run into the same damn problem every bad writer does; you aren't saying anything. These papers make the same damn conclusions over and over again. It's what we get for creating a system that values length over subject. Really, why is it a material and methods from 2013 is 5 pages longer than a one paragraph materials and methods from 1973? It's doesn't say anything amazing. Instead of just referencing the paper it cites, these damn things seem to write out the whole damn paper!
And oh my god! Auxin transport inhibitors inhibit plant hormone transportation? Really? I could have figured that out on my own, I don't need 20 fucking sentences rewording of the same sentence!
Math is interesting. Sats, contradictory to my thoughts 4 years ago, is an stimulating part of math that can be useful at times. Adding percentages and graphs that mean nothing does not help a god awful excuse for a paper. And really, you're part Chemistry! Its contributions to math are well noted! Your dependence on graphs and stats show your upbringing by biology and it's fear of math.
A discussion section is for discussion! How the project was done was covered in material methods! Stop bringing it up in the discussion section!
Honestly, this is part of the reason smart people don't get the respect they think they deserve: They are long winded, boring blowhards, too busy being wrapped up in something they think is success while ignoring the world around them. Biochem, these papers you and agro-biochem are making is that boring washed-up blowhard. Stop being so insecure that your teacher won't give you an "A", shorten your paper by 12 pages, and actually get to the fucking point. Better yet, stop repeating your point. It's the same thing, even if you put a hat on it. Or another percentage, whatever.
In conclusion, your paper stumbles around like a nervous virgin, returning to its same move that is ineffectual.

ISWG ramble

Why, hello there.
It's time for the thoughts that keep us awake at night to come to surface. Enough time for them to peak out at the sun, then I can push them back for another month, where they stew and help form some of the more interesting parts of my personality. And it is hosted by some of the finest people in the blogging world.
StumbleUpon keeps showing me websites about success. A few weeks ago, I had a three day vacation that gave me time to stop and reflect on the summer. It certainly was an interesting one. I miss the interesting summers that involved being chased by cows and crazy acts of testosterone. This one had it's fair share, and now it's time for the harvest season. Being a farmer was important to who I am, so I still think of things in respect to farming.
Right about this time, we had worked our asses and hoped the weather favored us for 5 months and we could finally see things paying off. We were rewarded for our efforts with tons of food and then could sell that or eat it. Also right about this time, I would have a great body from months of exercise and sunshine with a little extra money in my pocket. Again, I had the fore-mentioned insecurities pushed back in my mind that would make enjoying this time strange and sometimes dark, but that's a different story.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is, to hell with success. For the first time in 5 years, people look at me and say, "Why, that boy is doing well by MY standards."  I reaping a ton of rewards from a summer of hard work and slight adventure. You know what is truly frightening and scary though? The idea of living a life that society deems worthy, but feeling empty and mentally exhausted while asking yourself at all times, "But what AM I doing?"
How do you define success for yourself? When you write books, or even set goals for yourself, how do you know you did well at the end of the day? I don't want to be dark here. Personally, I know I am doing well if I am having fun and trying something different and new. The person who I am changes over time, and I can see sides of my personality form and develop, and I can bring them out when the situation calls for it. I change the environment, and adapt, and watch as pieces slowly change like the path of a river after a heavy storm. When you define success for yourself, and you can honestly say that you are using the best of yourself, then it's reflected in your personality. Hell, sometimes some people are strong enough to reflect in the people around them. Others notice. When others begin to notice though, then what? Is it good, bad, other?
Just go out and enjoy the harvest season. The hard work pays off, and it's something to enjoy.

What I'm doing this month.

So I'm supposed to being reading and posting Einstein's papers this month, but I didn't do the necessary preparations before hand. He wrote a lot of papers in German, is what I'm finding out at the moment. I'm trying to find something in english at the moment that would be a good place to start. If I can't find anything in time, then I'll just post some notes I've been taking on the book I'm reading at the moment, "Darwin on Trial". See you later tonight, imaginary friends.

HEY! LOOK HERE!

Lancaster, CA - A4620928 (right), a 3 month old male brindle chunky APBT Mix who came in as a stray 8/18. Avail. 8/22, KENNEL MATE is A4620929, a 3 month old APBT mix. Please call the shelter at 661.940.4191 RIGHT AWAY if you are interested in adopting any of the dogs I post. This shelter is a publicly funded County shelter with a high rate of 'strays' and 'owner turn ins' and therefore considered "high kill". if you are interested in any dogs I have listed, I urge you to immediately get in touch with the shelter for their adoption procedure. I have seen it too many times where dog's have lost their lives because someone waited just ONE day too long... When you are networking, tagging, etc. please know that rescue "Pages" do not get notifications when you 'line-tag' them (highlighting the page's name in a 'comment'). If you want a page to see a dog in need, you must post the link to the dog's thread (highlight/copy what is in your browser) ONTO their actual page or 'tag' them in the actual photo! Only 'people' (non-pages) you line-tag will get notified, providing they have this feature not turned "OFF".
Adoption fees at this shelter are $120 or less. There is a $20 license fee which only applies if you are a local resident. All fees include vaccines, micro chip and spay/neuter. Unaltered dogs are released after their spay/neuter, unless they get a waiver due to age or health.
The Lancaster, CA shelter is located at
5210 W. Ave. I
Lancaster, CA 93536
(661) 940-4191
Hours:
Monday – Thursday: 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Closed Holidays

Directions:
Take the 14 Freeway and exit at Ave. I,
Go 3 miles West to shelter.

NOTE: I am not a rescue, I spread the word about animals in danger at the Lancaster CA shelter which has a very high kill rate compared to other shelters! I don't collect pledges or PM the people who pledged. The person or rescue who saved the animal is responsible for collecting the pledges. I will post a PayPal address or donation information if provided. If you are willing to adopt or have questions on a dog I post, please call the shelter. I have not met ALL dogs I post personally and I can not always call the shelter on every dog to get updates. When I post "no longer listed" this means a dog was either adopted, rescued OR killed. DO NOT DOWNLOAD MY PHOTOS WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! PLEASE "SHARE" THEM ON FACEBOOK ONLY. ANYTHING ELSE YOU WISH TO USE MY PHOTOS FOR: PLEASE BE COURTEOUS AND ASK MY PERMISSION SO I CAN DECIDE IF I AM CONTENT WITH WHAT MY PHOTOS ARE BEING USED FOR. THANKS!

Sharpening the edge of a knife

And now your 25!
When you were 18 you were all hormones and no freedom. You were let out into the world to tear up the world with a lode of dumb ideas. And now you are 25.
Still full of hormones screaming at you to fuck shit up, but with the added benefit of the Ghosts of Dumb ideas past hovering over your shoulder. He's a prick, always there to remind me what I should and shouldn't do. Not like my parents when I was 18 who could only warn me in words. This bastard can just show me pictures and hi-res video.
"What's that?" He asks, "Want to stay out till 3 drinking, smoking, and hitting on women?" Causally, he triggers a thought. A memory of me with a headache telling my boss she's a bitch.
Oh, yeah, right.
"Hey," I tell him. "Imma gonna consume massive amounts of stuff because I'm stressing the fuck out."
In a voice that's almost a whisper he says: "Nateva".
"B-b-but, look at my friends! They go for drinks! On Wednesday!"
"That guy there has more money then you will ever see in three lifetimes. That guy has the body of Apollo and calls himself an artist because he has a job that lets him sleep till 12pm and goes to work whenever."
Most of the time, ignoring him is easy. As Robin Williams once said, "God gave man a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to power one at a time."
My advice: Stay blissfully ignorant of the poets, the artists and the philosophers. Thoreau is the reason why you are hungry and broke in a tent in the woods, Burroughs is the reason why your drunk in a small apartment trying to make it with sketchy women, and Hesse wrote the words that justify your life.
Better yet, no harm has come out of Browning or Tennyson. Rowling, Lovecraft and Tolkien give people harmless fantasy escape. It gives the mind to think, relax, and dream about wholesome activities and magic.
C.P. Snow? That dude is dangerous, making the world think science and art should be one and that ethics should a concern for science. You'll find yourself making videos on youtube about math using tinkertoys before long, when you should be contributing to the machine of society. You will be calling for the creation of affordable solar panels for the third world.
What happens to young trouble makers, the youth that stopped around and demanded change? Mandela is dying, Johnny Rotten is a dick, Bono is an arrogant ass, and the ones who died from alcohol, people and plain bad luck are too many to count.
So raise a glass to the hormones of the young, kick the Ghost in the nuts, and live like Dylan Thomas.

Calcium filler post

Calcium. Not just for milk! What started as a post about the mechanisms of calcium signalling in plants fell completely when I realized how complex it was to read about in a week. There is still some cool stuff about calcium and how it makes the world around us work.
Sydney Ringer has one of best science discovery stories. He was keeping rat hearts in tap water suspensions. That is something out of Frankenstein. He found that the hearts would keep contracting in the tap water solutions, but would slow and stop when in distilled water. After some experimentation with calcium salts, he got it to work again. Man, the best that will happen in my job is mold taking over someone's brain.
It helps with nutrient exchange in plants. It signals mychorrzial fungus for penetration of roots epidermal cells. Build up of calcium cations happens when the plant is stressed due to factors such as drought and aboitic stress.
This doesn't answer my question of why it works though. It's frustrating to think that you've come so far in your understanding of things and then you hit something that's above what you actually know. Damnit. And now for me to plug the fact that I want to read Einstein! Because that bastard said lots of things I don't understand.

Notes from vacation

Find a girl who is afraid of snakes. Find a guy who is afraid of heights. Find someone who is AFRAID. Because the man who fears nothing but death; who laughs at thunder, who races storms, and finds humor in the darkest moments, is a friend of the devil, and when you see what goes on in his head, well son, you best be fucking holding on for dear life. Because it will be ride you will not forget.

Espirit l'escalier part 2

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Ganoderma_lucidum_01.jpg/270px-Ganoderma_lucidum_01.jpg

Reishi, or Ganoderma lucidum to those in the know, has all sorts of stuff to help the blood. Next up on "Questions I wished I had a better answer for" is the anti-inflamatory and anti-coagulants of Reishi mushrooms. Why Reishi and not any of the other mushrooms or anti-inflammatory plants? Because I like the name and it's become sort of famous in the mushroom hunting world.
The original question given to me I felt I did not give justice because I had a problem understanding it, due to my love of loud rock music slowly destroying my ears over the years. I can't repeat the question because of this, so all I can say is it had the terms mushrooms and it's affects on blood in it. My answer sort of touched on reishi because it was the only thing I could think of at the time.
Here's the deal, Reishi, like Red Reishi, has some pretty spectacular effects.  It has complex carbohydrates known as water-soluble polysaccharides, triterpeniods, proteins and amino acids¹ that provide the active blood pressure reducing effect
This is a tough one to research, but it seems like you just need to ask the right questions. The major player in Ganoderma is ganoderic acid, which is made up of triterpenes and polysaccharides. Studies have shown that both chemical strands, by themselves, have quite a few potential effects on health^[2]. By itself, ganoderic acid has pretty effective medicinal properties, which have been studied primarily in China, where the mushroom has been popular for medicine for years. The studies on the effectiveness of the preparations are still under way, but studies since at least 2006 have been positive^[3].
It's used for the treatment of a wide variety of things, like lupus, bronchitis, anorexia, diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular conditions^[2]. It's the trierpenoids that have been found to work the best for hypertension, working as ACE inhibitors causing the blood vessels to expand. The polysaccharides have been observed to have anti-tumor and reduces cell damage caused by mutagens^[4].
So there's my best research to try and explain some of the effects of Reishi on the human body and the blood. Man, this was intense. I will be back next week.

Espirit l'escalier

You know what? There are some things from my talk on mushrooms that I wished I handled differently, now that I have had a day to recover and think about it. Mostly, I am thinking of the questions that were asked, but I didn't give an answer that I thought was good.
The question that asked was stereotypical of a talk where people talk about the importance of something. "If x disappeared, how much trouble WOULD we be in?" Of course, I had to think of an answer on the spot, and I wanted to finish so I go enjoy my beer. That was one of the best beers I had, by the way.
Due to the beauty of the Internet, I can give a better answer to that question! I don't think anyone who follows this blog was in Philadelphia at the Frankford Hall when I gave my talk, but part of my inability to advertise comes from still being new at this and still being nervous. As I get older, I'll get better, I swear.
I said it would be bad, and I stand by it. If we lost just the fungus used for industrial purposes, it would knock us on our asses but we would cope. We got this far by being conniving little monkeys who are resourceful beyond belief. We would survive. If all fungus disappeared though. . .
We have yet to categorize half of the biology that exists in this world. Fungus is weirdly specific as well, it's hard to track it down. My aunt is fond of talking of the one that grows on the blond hair of a baby boy. And all of the functions it has is still a mystery to us. We are amazing in that we look at all of accomplishments, pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Nature and the world we live in is too large to be understood in the short amount of time we lived. It constantly shows us something we have never seen and defies expectations at every turn.
I brought up the paper I read during the winter about the research being done on the fungus in the stomaches of mice. Curiosity brought them to the point of eradicating the entire growth of fungus in the creatures stomachs. They got sick. We know there is rain in the rain forest, but we are not sure why. We know the presence of organic sodium particles in the atmosphere of the jungle seed the clouds, and according to a study published in August issue of Science last year, we think it might have to do with fungus. Fungus contributes greatly to soil health, helping with nutrient uptake to the plants, breaking down insoluble minerals for plant consumption, and helping creating humus for a healthy soil structure. But this all really just the tip of a very massive iceberg.
Really, the brilliant minds you see exist based on the work and ideas of the men who came before them. As Newton said, we are all dwarfs standing on the backs of giants. We have yet to see beyond the clouds.

Post!!!

And so ends my 2 month obsession with thinking about fungus and having to talk in front of people. Job is finally slowing down for the winter month, hopefully. Now it's time to sit down and focus on writing to exercise the demons.
Hey, this means this post can be about anything! I don't have to talk about my plans, fears, or desires. I don't have to think about mushrooms today. I can take a break before I buckle down and obsess about about Einstein math.
It's no fun to live in the past. It's fun to visit, but I would never make a home there. It boggles my mind when I hear people my age talk about they would rather live in the 60's because those were times when social change happened and people cared, man! The world we live in now rarely slows down and has enough to be pissed about as well as sights to be happy about. It's in our nature to fight and change the world. We are the earthmovers.
Of course, this has nothing to do with anything at all, today. Sometimes I just think about what it takes to become a strong enough personality to change space and time as we know it. We got to exercise that personality, ya know? Turn ourselves into a beacon that is able to attract the best and the brightest of our peers, and become friendly and down to earth enough that we can say we genuinely enjoy our time on earth. And then our friends will help blow up the world.
You know what? It's fun to be extreme and work for a world that we would like to see exist. One day I will grow old and cynical and, like Aristotle, begin to bitch about children having no respect for traditions or their elders.
I spend a lot of time talking. The only action I've taken though is trying to convince people I'm smarter than I am, and sort of working towards making a world I want to live in. Meh.
This concludes an unfocused piece about the subject of nothing at all. Maybe I'll write up that talk I gave, or at least post the slides, but don't count on it. Enjoy your day, and I'm not dead yet.

IWSG for July

I'm here this week! I've started to obsess over my many different projects. Some of them are personal, like gathering the pieces to build my supercomputer. A few of them are job related. I'm obsessing about a talk I get to give on fungus. And I'm thinking of the BIG stuff I want to do for the blog.
I've got to write that blogger award post soon. That will probably get started tomorrow and go up on the weekend. I've been working towards a month long blog project in September where I read, write about, and try to understand the works of Einstein. I got to start screening the stuff I want to read for that.
 My ISWG isn't any form of tips or this-is-what-I-do stories. It's more of question. There are people doing this for a while now, and I have to ask, how do you advertise your self and your projects. There are always the ideas that come to mind instantly; post on the social network sites, guest posts, xeroxed posters around town. But really, trying to independently publish your stuff comes with the hurtle of how to actually tell the world you exist. Any one have any good thoughts or comments?
It's the blog's birthday, pretty much. I don't write this stuff down. I've been doing this blog thing for a year now though. It's fun, and I'm glad I found this community in the IWSG and A to Z groups. A group of people that read others blogs and offer support? Who'da thought? Really, though, I've outlined my plans, sort of, for the next few months. I'm trying to work on stuff to post while the world around me gets busy. I guess I just have to focus on the quality if the quantity is getting harder to maintain. You people are beautiful. Shine on.

Cups of liquid adrenaline

Have you ever felt that the bland, drab, and boring try to push their lifestyle on you?
The uninteresting, safe guys who never tried to take a chance. Those guys who pat themselves on the back because they "just know" that eventually everyone around them will slow down to their pace and that they, the beige and neutral background players, will be rewarded for life of staying at home and making the "smart, safe decisions." And, like the borg, they want to assimilate you into their lifestyle.
You can start to fight the current of the river of blandness by reading the work of Dylan Thomas and Hunter S. Thompson. As you fight the dying of the light, think about what a day with fun entails. Don't think about the army of drones and zombies that shuffle in and out of your life. Think about adventure around the next corner. Is all the money in the world worth twilight years spent contemplating a life spent in idle waste? Life is best experienced through all of its peaks and valleys.
Live a life of poet, and feel every extreme emotion pulse through your body. Fall in love with every girl you meet, and lament on how short our time on earth is. Feel fear fill your body as you face ever terror that lurks behind each corner. Enjoy the feeling of safety as you walk out of the situation untouched. Enjoy depression, and remember that no matter how alone you feel, the world is filled with people who share that loneliness.
During your journey, walk down the dark paths with no maps. I guarantee your stories will be interesting, and your character will be better. And at the end of it all, if there is someone on the other side, you can look the creator in the eye and say "That is one hell of a ride you built."

What, What! It's WEDNESDAY!

It's Wednesday, and I'm insecure. It's those little things that make me, me.I think i's a time for a change though when it comes to advice Let me ask you something; when was the last time you typed your stories naked and uploaded the videos to youtube? Being naked is quiet liberating, you know. As you walk down the streets letting the breeze brush your skin, you'll find your insecurities float away in the wind.
When was the last time you sent your short stories into playboy? Sure, that's the bug time, but your words will grace the same pages as Shel Silverstein and Ray Bradbury once did.
If your still insecuring, try making out with a stranger on main street in the daylight. Show the world you don't care and you won't play by their rules!
Maybe your writers block or insecurities come from the fact that you haven't lived the life of a suffering writer. When I'm faced with this problem, I look to my idols, Oscar Wilde, Vincent Van Gogh, and the Buddhist monks from the 1960's.  Following their example, I proceed to cut off my year, contract syphilis, and light myself on fire. Honestly, I don't know how others spend their Saturdays.

Surreal Shapes in the Sunday Shade.

Hey there blog land. How's your Sunday? Can you believe it's June? We're almost halfway through the year. In another month, I'll have done this for a year. It's been a while since I've just written some quiet and low key. No talk of romance and math. No talk of dogs. Just a chance to put fingers on keys and type.
What would you do for a Klondike bar, and is there a wrong way to eat one? Ever had a perfect line you wanted to use for something, but found it was the equivalent of a dead end? Long cat sure is long.
There is no feeling like the one you get when you wake up in a strange place. The trees stretch miles high and the people are strange. The field you wake up in stretches miles in front of you in sea of blue. There's someone next to you, but you can't think with the fog in your brain. I feel 15 again as I try to make her clothes come off with the power of mind. Hell, I could go with a nipple slip.
The world and it's perspective changes. Sometimes I see him, or you, or sometimes he and you are me. We stand and we walk, because something is controlling our legs. As we move forward in the world, the grass grows up around us and wraps around the trees. It crisses and crosses and merge into beautiful patterns. But they quickly fade from your mind as we journey forward. You look to your right and ask the girl walking next to you where you're going.
Мы идем к месту, где улицы не имеют названия. She says.
What?
Мы вечные. Мы бессмертны.
We nod our head at the gibberish.  I turn as you, he and she keep walking. I stop for a drink at the bar. A man with a familiar face stands there.
당신은 무엇을 하시겠습니까? He asks.
Два пива.
He spins. There's a shoe in his hand. You thank him and walk out the door.
Outside, on the sidewalk, we wrap ourselves in our jacket as the wind goes past our skin. The streets are empty, and the city makes no sound. A police officer walks up to you and pushes you over. We fall, and protest. The cop kicks me. A sharp pain builds in our body as we feel the force. Hours go by. You see feet going by your face and wonder why no one stops him. And then it stops. You stand up, but the field is empty. It stretches in all sides like a blue ocean. A girl lays sleeping on the ground, and you wonder if maybe the world is different in a different direction.

Get healthy or DIE!

Hey! It's that time again! The sun is out for long periods of time and, if you don't live in Vermont, all the snow is gone finally. Any attempts to stay inside is met with accusations of being "anti-social" or "a vampire". But months of staying inside having taken their toll, so chances are good that you do not look good in a bathing suit.

It's time to get healthy. The summer is the perfect time to do it too. No more using the cold as an excuse to not go outside and run, walk, or bike ride. The outdoors is calling your name. The farmers markets have open up and you can go ride out to get healthy food from local people. Did you know by supporting your local business you increase pride in the community? If you increase pride, then you increase your chances of turning your local football team into the Wolverines when the communist invade. Buy local and don't the damn dirty reds win when they invade.
Back to healthy eating and healthy living. Really, there's a lot to be said about it, and not all of it I'm behind. I like living, but living forever seems over rated. But as writers, being healthy will help with creativity which is

helpful.
Add exercise to your daily routine. When you pick something up, squat down and pick it up like it's fifty pounds. If you walk there, then do it. I'm a mathematician and biologist. I'm really the last person you should come to for advice. I'm setting my own goals to get in shape. I want to bike to work every day, shop at the farmer markets, and eat better. And if all that fails, I'll try Lucky cigarettes.

The world of 42 on the 24th.

Finally, a platform that I can introduce my logic to the world!
It has been said that 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything. Of course, people who read the book know that humor and plot came from the fact the question is not known. It's similar to the question "Why is a raven like a writing desk?". They are both silly, and they both lack something important to make them a real question and a real answer. 42 has no question, and "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" has no answer.
This answer does not fit in with what the poets and song writers have told me what the answer is though: Love. Love is many things, according to the great romantics of history. It's all I need, it's a battlefield, and it's sweeter than honey. Most importantly, it's answer that has no question. So, can the ultimate answer be both love and 42? If love is 42, then yes. 42 can represent love, and love can be the value of 42.
With the substitution property, we can place 42 as the answer to all sorts of questions. "Why do we do crazy things? 42." or perhaps "42 is all you need." The second one brings me to my next point. Sometimes, people come to my door with what they call a "Book of Truths". Inside of this book, is all sorts of morals, laws and stories on the history of the world. To them, God is love. And some people may realize where I'm going with this, and others may hit the unfollow button at this point. Ahem. Through the use of the transitive property, A=B, B=C, therefore A=C, we can logically conclude that since God is love, love is the answer, and the answer is also 42, then God is 42. Which, according to the statement "42 is all you need", would make sense.
42 does have some importance. It is the only number universally retired in baseball. 4.20 is 4.2 on a calculator, and 420 is important number in the Modern American Stoner culture. But, like God and love, 42 is unquantifiable and cannot be analyzed. 42 falls apart when logic is applied, and therefore must be taken in faith. 42 is truth, 42 is wonder, magic and passion.
Hope you enjoy my towel day post. Go out and spread the word of 42.

Kerosine

I talk about deep and intellectual things, I guess. But you know what, Star Trek. I am ready for this movie. Most of you have problely have seen it, but I haven't and I am so ready to watch this!
I used to watch movies that were smart. Pssssssh. It sucks trying to keep up with artistry and sometimes pretentious things. I really like dumb comedy, geeky comic books and comic book movie.
So yeah, nothing amazing to read here if you read a science blog.
I'm doing this all wrong. I'm going to start blogging about parties, booze, women, and pot. It will all be very safe, maybe some pills here and there. Got to get away from this nerd persona.
Tune in next time for "The best drunkest sluts at the best party schools!"

Counting in Wonderland

You know what you do if you have an interest in math? You make up you're way to count. Be warned, this is not for the faint of heart.

I have to say counting in decimal isn't much fun. A lot of you may know how to count in binary, some of you may know something like hexadecimal or octal, and the true power nerds may know something obscure like Mayan counting or Babylonian. What's more fun than trying to count in these already established systems? Making up our own and learning the process as we go along.
When I was wee little lad, I used to enjoy learning code and making up my own to share with my friends. Of course, when you're young, your codes are nothing more than swapping one letter for another. That's how we'll start today, by using the symbols of the alphabet to represent numbers. The first letter and number in our counting system will be A. A will not represent the singular. A will be nothing. If we say we have A of something, then we have none of it. This might be confusing to some, but the idea of having nothing represented symbolically is an old idea that is fairly useful, to put it lightly. If I have a singular orange, then I'll have B orange. If I place B orange down, then the result is C.  D is B more than C. Now we can continue to extend this logic Z, which is B more then Y, C more than X, and W  more than D.
What comes after Z? This is a number far from infinity, you will hopefully reach an age older than Z, and I hope you will have way more money than Z. It may do for a silly paper on math, but for everyday use, it's useless.
Let us go back to A. In roman numerals, you change the sign at significant numbers to reduce the amount of  "I"s you have to draw. I can't add signs, but I can add rules! Mwahahahahaha. The first spot, you multiply the number by B. If you add another spot, BA, that B is now equal to BA = Z + B. We can now call that the "BA" spot. And you can extend it further, BAA, is equal to ZZ + B. You can do this for as many numbers as you like. As you extend the spots, any place will be equal to (Z + B) ^Ж where Ж is the number of characters. For example, (Z + B)^G would be BAAAAA. (Z + B)^J would be BAAAAAAAA. BB is B more than BA. CA is (Z + B) * C. CB is B more than CA, and CZ is Z more than CA and is B less than DA.
We can create a decimal point by using division. A.B  is equal to B/BA. A.AB = B/BAA. And logically this can be extended outwards.
This is probably confusing and silly to most people. Quite honestly, I've been reading about Lewis Carrol recently, so this in part is inspired by him. Also, this was an old puzzle I used to post to dating sites when I got bored, and I decided it was time to bring it out. What I really want to work on with it though, is how math works within this set. This uses basic logic to set up rules. After reading a book about quaternions, I was curious how to set up a mathematical system based on any other system of logic. That essay will be coming at some point, but for now I'll set up the numbers first.
Enjoy this alphadecimal system.  Feel free to play with it a little, and post and questions or comments below.

Post!

This a day late and a dollar short, but the world is great and so are you. I hope you spend your weekend like a rockstar, and you enjoy every minute on this big blue ball of earth. Shine on, you imaginary numbers.

Amateur Scientists! - Russell W. Porter

I want to try writing some biographies about scientists. Chiefly scientists who fall in the realm of more amateur, because science isn't just for the people with degrees and millions of dollars. It's an art based of off the observation of nature, asking questions like why and how, and using reasoning to begin to look for those answers. Anyone with a curious mind or the desire to have a curious mind can begin to take steps to look for their own answers and draw their own conclusions through a process of trial and error.
After that speech, the first person I want to talk about is Russell W. Porter, who did have a degree from MIT. I choose him for two reasons. The first reason is he was born and raised in Springfield, Vermont which was literally right next door to where I grew up in Rockingham Vermont. I had never heard his name until two years ago, when my grandfather was giving away his library of books and one of Porter's books was in there. We'll get back to the book in a minute. I partly never heard of him because I went to Springfield's rival school, Bellows Falls, so we choose not to talk about them. Both towns had a rich history around the turn of the century, Bellows Falls was the biggest paper producer, had the richest woman in the world, Hetty Green, and the first canal in the Western Hemisphere. Springfield had James Hartness, who was an engineer and former Vermont govener, and a manufacturing industry so large the town was on Hitler's list of places to bomb in WW2. And they Porter. The second reason is his work in amateur astronomy.

Source

Porter was born in 1871. He studied engineering at University of Vermont and Norwich, and later studied art and architecture at MIT. He became a professor of architecture, but that was only one of his many talents.
His art and drawings, shown to the left, made the cutaway style of drawing popular (more here). But wait, he did more! He was an arctic explorer as well. He volunteered his efforts as an artist to the voyages of Fredrick Cook's voyage to Greenland in 1893, and made several more trips to the arctic, sometimes as an artist and surveyor, sometimes as an astronomical expert.

Source

It's the astronomy I would like to talk about, because his reputation in the field is greater. You see, the book I was talking about was called Amateur Telescope Making which is a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American. He noticed a lack of books and articles in America at the time about how amateurs could build their own telescopes, and began to use books from Europe to write articles remedying the problem. In it, he describes how to build lenses for any sort of telescopes in your basements. Telescope were not cheap at the time, and they still cost a bit of money today. By building one, someone interested in the universe could not only have a good quality scope, but, with practice, they could build one that was better than what is offered. He was a founder of Stellafane of Springfield, which is still around today as the oldest Amateur club in the US and now one of the oldest in world. They give lessons there on building your own mirrors, which I took part in.
He later worked for the war effort by drawing cutaway drawings for military equipment in his later years. On the day he died in 1949, he had been working on a lens in his basement.

Reflections on the Challenge

Well, that was a nice break.
This is late, but here are my thoughts and reflections on A to Z.  It was fun. I was exposed to many other blogs to read, even some science blogs that update! I've already put up some of my thoughts and reflections. These are my thoughts as a whole. This was my first year participating in this, and I didn't really have a theme. Sure, I mostly posted about science and math, but I try to do that anyways on daily basis. And, well, some days I just wrote about random things if I was busy or lazy that day, like my E post, or my M post for that matter. It was tough trying to keep up and on top of it, I know I'm not the only person who has other obligations besides this blog. In fact, going through the people I follow, some people seem to still be finishing up.
So what knowledge did I gain from this?
People responded well to my first post, and my last post about mushrooms, but not the other one. I want to go back to some of the post I did and start to figure out what I did well, and what didn't work. I know that my V post did so well because I was so proud of it I posted it everywhere I could. It payed off. Others, like the mushrooms, sort-of did well but I think they need some work. See, this is the stuff I like to work on. I used to stomp around when my posts where I'm tired and writing to get rid of thoughts did well, because I'm not a fan of it. So I like it when I write something about vectors, mushrooms or non-Greek mathematics and it does really well.
I learned that I need to have a point when I'm writing. I did my post on the Krebs Cycle, and no one read it. That's fine, I hated it, and I know now that it was partly because I sat down and just started writing. I had no destination in mind, no goal, I just wrote. So it goes everywhere and can't decide what it wants to talk about. I almost ran into this problem again when I tried writing my first post after the A to Z challenge. Probably because I spent a month writing short posts, I figured out why I was so unsatisfied and preceded to hand-write 4 pages which I then posted. Yeah, it's long.
I tried some programing I've been working on this month. I drew some pictures to post. I got out of this long deep funk I had about writing by having fun and experimenting. I'm going to lay off trying anything wild for a while though, and go back to practicing for the next time a month long challenge happens.
I said it before, but I want to try posting at least twice a week this month to see how it does. Now, when I say Tuesday and Thursday, I mean later on those days. Yeah. So keep your eyes open for that. I want to start making more of a social network presence (except for Facebook, maybe I'll make some sort of page soon, but I like a little less than 200 friends). As I get around to it, they'll go up here. Also, I want to do another blog hop challenge thing. It was fun and exciting, I liked seeing new readers, and I get better as a writer when people read what I write (go figure).
Before I forget, I want to say that I'm disgusted. The winter Olympics are in Russia this winter, and like many countries that get the Olympics, they are working to make they're country beautiful to visitors. People who've been keeping up with my site recently might see where this is going.
Did you know it's easier to catch and kill stray dogs then to put them in a shelter? Moscow is budgeting $54,000 to exterminating stray dogs. And they have a reputation of doing it in cruel ways. To sum up both articles, funding shelters would put a strain on the cities finances, but they can budget money to kill strays. And in the past, authorities handed out air-rifles with poison to volunteers to kill the strays. People have pointed out that this does not solve any problems, in fact the rat population increases when the stray population decreases. So click above to find out how to donate and spread the word.

Break.

I signed up for the "A to Z aftermath thing", but I really want a break from A to Z and posting more than anything. My reflections will go up tomorrow.

A young man's Journey with music.

I spent a month having to do research on a topic in a rushed sort of way. So today I want to stretch my self mentally and talk about albums and music I like.
This is ten albums I find myself listening to over and over again. This is not my favorite songs, or musicians. These are albums that I've listen to a hundred times and still can listen to today.
Let's start this journey with Pink Floyd's  The Wall. Just a fair warning, the first few albums are albums you may have heard of or have been praised by every generation since they came out. The reason for this is that I did not like what was being played on the radio when I was in high school. I did love classic rock because I could dig through my dad's old albums and discover songs I couldn't hear on the radio. I would stay up all night and read wiki links on these bands and memorize facts about these long dead bands. The Wall was one of the first albums I bought, but I thought it was boring save for Another Brick, Part 2. I ignored it for the longest time in favor for another CD I bought called Guns and Rose's Live Era. Then I discovered Dark Side of The Moon.
It introduced me to the idea of concept album, and how you could have a group of songs around a central theme. I thought it was amazing, so I did more research into the band. The Wall is a story, and is a well written story. It is the reason why I still buy the album, and not just the song to this today. The way the music would segway into the next song or how each song was just a peice of the story showed me what music could do. And I used to put on a good set of headphones and write. Sometimes I drew. It was the perfect back ground music to relax to. It is a long way from Dark Side or any of the albums after. In my opinion, it was the height of Roger Water's song writing abilities.
So I began to explore the other artists on the radio. I took a class senior year called "History of Rock" which spent a chapter on the Beatles. And I discovered  Disraeli Gears by Cream. This and the White Album were on my car sterio during my trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. This makes my list, though, because of my first and only full year of college, when I would hand girls my CD case to look through. To this day, I still don't know why they always got excited over this album. I think it has something to do with Eric Clapton.
It's great. You should listen to it if you haven't. It's heavy before heavy was a thing, and it's trippy as all hell. And it's last track Mother's Lament was plain fun. Story goes that critics didn't think much of it when it came out, leading to the demise of the group. But, it inspired generations of rock.
Including Black Sabbath! There's a handful of metal I can actually stand. Most of it is too fast and the singers screaming about Satan and darkness makes me laugh more than anything. I'm generalizing, yes. As I said, there is metal I can listen to and enjoy. Paranoid by Black Sabbath is an album I've listened to so many times and can still rock out to.
These albums make my list because they had  memories tied to them. Disraeli Gears has the memories of traveling to rocks mecca for a summer. Paranoid exists in a time after high school when I decided to try and get away from home for the first time. Some of the memories may not have happened when the songs were playing, but the albums served as soundtracks to my life. Many people out there may relate with other songs and albums, or maybe books or movies highlight the experiences in your life.
Paranoid helps me with a point. These are the soundtracks to a confused kid trying to grow up in a world where the motivations of its characters are not always clear. The person who listens to theseParanoid plays on fear, and it spoke to  him years ago after the world tried to destroy him. He thought he was insane. He saw what a person could do when they where frightened and for years he lived with that guilt. Paranoid has always been on since then to help him forget for just a little while what dangers lurked outside of his head.
now is not the same kid who felt betrayed by the girl he was always hanging out with. He's not the same boy who tried to sort out his own emotions while struggling to understand the thoughts of the opposite sex.
So I went to college, like everyone told me I should. I wnet because successful people went to college. You meet people like yourself in college. You grow, you expand, you become someone new.
I listened to Layla to deal with the thoughts that still bothered me. I attempted to use Disraeli Gears as a way to get laid (doesn't work). Music doesn't hide you from yourself for long, and I didn't want to be at college. I thought the system was a god awful mess. High school sucked. People played the system and got ahead with learning a damn thing. I tried hard to be the best at everything and failed. I was sick of school.

The energy and mayhem of punk spoke to me in freshmen year of college. And the blues comforted my emotions. I hated things and I wanted to break, hurt and smash. Sometimes I wanted to hide from everyone and the world. The two styles met in Consolers of the Lonely by the Raconteurs. That and Let it Bleed by the Rolling Stones became the soundtrack as my friends and I began to tear the school apart. We tore up signs, lit them on fire and shot fireballs from the windows. Consolers played in all of our rooms as we became the three bringers of chaos.
Wild children must grow up though. As the world around me matured, I was still caught in the thoughts of a girl who hurt me so long ago. Music no longer offered the same support, so while I listened to Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones I used more drugs. We drank tea made from poppies with effects like Vicodin and later listened to Hot Rats. I consoled distraught friends while I was on shrooms and Herbie Hancock played. The young man flipped his truck on an icy road in Vermont, slid on it's cab and walked home 7 miles in the middle of February. Luckily opium calms you down.
I still maintain Sticky Fingers is the best album by the Stones. The sex, drugs and rock were out in full on that album, but the slower blues songs sounded remorseful. They had begun to watch their friends and acquaintances die from the lifestyle. "Sister Morphine" is the greatest song on pain ever written. I drove everyone crazy when I came back from my first farm job. But I couldn't walk due to an infected cyst on my lower back, and I thought I would have to give up my dreams after dropping out of college then finding and losing my dream job and girl. After that, I have many songs from them that bring back memories (The stories of "Angie: is good love story of lost love, and "Ventilator Blues" tells the story of my relapse.) No Rolling Stone album since then has had the same impact.

When I dropped out of school and lived in tent while working on an organic farm, No Other Love by Chuck Prophet is what I listened to. I saw how the science they crammed down my throat for years was present in nature, and how math made a beautiful puzzle. I listened to this album while I shoveled stalls and told pigs stories like Heracles and The Three Little Pigs. I raced storms on bicycles, fought cows and punched my boss in the face. "Storm Across the Sea" reminded me of a girl I met and it's possible "What Makes the Monkey Dance" is nonsense, but the beat helps set "the mood" without being obvious like Barry White.
The period of anger and violence soon ended. It was turned inward as depression. What I wrote I hated. It was from the hallucigenic stuff I wrote before. It was depressed. I listened to If We Can't Trust the Doctors by Blanche. The dark country lyrics about pills, fear, and trust issues were perfect for the time. "Jack on Fire" is a haunting cover about a man who wants sex. They own it. They also make an original version "Running With The Devil". Meanwhile, the young man was trapped at his parents house and trying to clean up while trying to beat the voices that bothered him. It's easy. All you have to do is stop hanging out with your friends.
Someone thought to get him tested for adult ADHD. The therapy helped him more than anything. I learned to face a problem head on and not just to fight it. I listened to Passages by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass. It kept me calm and focused towards new goals. It played while I sat on the docks of Auckland. I hitched-hiked in New Zealand, tried to explain the appeal of the Grateful Dead to a french girl, and explained the math I learned in my free time to a dutch girl. I came back to the U.S. and left the state I grew up in. And while I worked on yet another farm, I introduce others to the calming sounds of Passages.
The sounds of The Black Album was the soundtrack to a kid on top of the world. The confused, hurt, angry kid was fading in the distance, replaced by someone with confidence. Success was something he could see. The crazy kid still exists, but comes out less and less. I saw Jay-Z in concert recently, I just had to sneak up to the stage Metal Gear style to see him.
And now I listen to the Dead Kennedy's Frankenchrist to prove that growing up is hard. Sometimes you try to shake off the past, but somethings you want to hold on to. Like trying to change a system that you find unfair, even if the system threatens everyday to swallow you up with it's bills and rent and health care. To hell with the world!  I still crave irrelevance, and adventure. I want to work towards dreams as a means of making a success that I can be happy with. I talk my way into Research, write blogs and learn to program as homage to that young man who has changed with his sense of music through the years. So here is to the ones who make a little chaos in the world. Let's hope they grow up and survive.

Insecure Writers group after the month long writing challenge.

Oh, right. Insecure Writers are meeting today. Just when you thought you were going to get a break after the A to Z challenge, it's time for the monthly blog hop put on by the great Alex J. Cavanaugh.
Man, it feels so good to get to the other side of that, doesn't it? I had been kind of ignoring this blog for other things, so it was nice to write everyday. Still feeling young and new to this this whole thing, I was able to learn a lot during it and put some things I've been practicing into motion. I guess I'll just keep changing as a writer, blogger and a person.
One thing I had to learn how to do was plan ahead, and to not fret that much about what I was posting. My self editing needs some work, but I'm working on it. This month, I want to post twice a week and see how that works out. I have a plan for what I want to post, so stop by on Tuesdays and Thursdays to see if anything interests you. Tomorrow I'll just write about music. I like music.
But now I don't have to worry about writing everyday! I can go back to practicing and learning new skills to help my writing, my website skills, and my math until the next month long challenge.
Did you get anything out of the challenge? Did you see many new blogs? Do you have no idea what I'm talking about? Have you had a chance to look at that Button called "A word about dogs?"
See you around.

Z is the omega. It is the end.

Z was going to be a variable, but I thought it would be better to be zero. As in nothing. As in Celebrate! It's done for the year! The past month was fun and intense, but now I'm going to go back to studying things and trying to get better at this writing and blogging thing. Also, this got me back into thinking about blogging again, so I'm going to make two posts a week. Lets hope for the best.
Zero hasn't been around forever. In fact, some ancient cultures may find it a bit redundant to represent nothing. It's better than that though. It's makes a great place holder. Um, I was going to say it's easier than writing a lot of letters, but the Roman's had a great system of just writing a box around things they wanted to multiply by 10,000. It's good as a limit in infinite series, and without it you can't confuse people by talking about negative numbers. It looks like tiny donuts. Replace it with an o. Make emoticons with it o_0 Yes, the little zero is certainly a useful little guy, but today, I'll use it to say that the number of A to Z posts are 0.
Thanks everybody who ran this, and thak you to everyone who came by. I saw many cool new blogs and learned a lot of new things. Hopefully this will happen again next year.

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I slipped up a new page quietly and without any sort of fanfare, because I like to be inconspicuous like that. You should check it out though if you are an animal lover. You might have noticed my slight obsession with Russia, I like to sneak some Russian words into my posts sometimes and I spent a post talking about the visitors I get from Russia. I have some friends from the area and they told me about the stray dogs in Moscow.
The problem is nothing new, but what is new is that people have taken it upon themselves to start killing the strays through poisoning, knives and other means. This also affects the domestic animals as well. The shelters themselves are not that great, they look like they've just been thrown together. So I am attempting to raise some money to help various shelters so they can take in more dogs and help protect them from the freaks More information above. Can't afford to donate? Well, I have a badge just for you to help spread the word!
Yes, I understand strays are a problem every where. But we can look at this as a way to extend a helping hand to a country where relations have been shaky for a while. At very least, please spread the word.

Y is just a symbol.

Start with a series of numbers. It can be simple:

1,2,3,4,5 . . .

Or if you feel a little more adventurous, it can be a little more complex:

1, 4, 16, 64, 256 . . .

Maybe you choose to write whatever number comes to mind. Maybe you have darts and decide to throw them at the wall with numbers on it. Any way you decide to do it, after a while, it will become boring.  As you are probably aware of, there are ways to represent a series, finite or infinite. Being new to the whole blogging math thing, I still suck at trying to write formulas online. Bear with me. Or bare with me, I don't mind.
In order to work with this formula, you need a series that uses a pattern you can figure out. The second example is one I'll use for discussion. You can figure out the pattern of a series of random numbers, it just involves probability and that's a discussion for another day.
Ok, the series above is simple as 4ⁿ where n is any number greater than or equal to zero. Use any number, like 20, and you will get what that number is in that position is in the series,  1099511627776.
You can go on for ever. Figure out 4 to the power of googol is, for all I care. Or we just say that any answer you get is y.

4ⁿ = y

The point I'm trying to make isn't series are fun, but letters are meaningless. Y is a symbol that can be given rules and reason, whether it's mathematical, or I'm texting dumb people with "y u so dumb?"
Symbols gain their power by some from an all powerful, all knowing book (The Dictionary!) or most people give them power by context.

Prutty pictures in da spring.

Some pretty pictures drawn with math for you to enjoy on this Sunday. I'll post the equations I used in Javascript for you to go along with the picture. The one at the top is one I did a few weeks ago, and I can't really remember the equation for it.

The first one is a simple spiral. I'm calling it "Ripples on a pond"  because that's what it looks like to me. It's an Archimedes Sprial with a parametric equation of  x = (3 + 4 * theta) * Cos(theta), y = (1 * theta) * sin(theta), where theta is a series of numbers between 0 and 720 that increases by 0.01. This is giving me a magic eye vibe, honestly. It might be my screen resolution, but I think I can see a bend in the shape o an hour glass on it.

 It would be fun to discuss random patterns within finite possibilites. These pictures are probably nothing new, since they use every day fomulas to make. What makes the pictures fun to make is cranking up the number of lines and seeing what kind of patterns emerge. My computer is a constantly disappointing pile of crap. For whatever reason I can't do a really high count. So enjoy these pictures as something to look at, and enjoy your Sunday.

This looks like an eyeball, right? If you trace the lines, you can see the reflections of light. Uses the parametric eqaution of a circle x = 200 * cos(theta), y = 200 * sin(theta), theta is the tangent of a series that increases by 1.

X is for . . . OMG! I have to leave!

Almost forgot to post today! X is a commonly used stand in for numbers in math. According to some, Descartes is the reason why. He introduced it in one of his many works, and he had been using it years before.
This is a very short post because I have to run, I have a math thing to go to. But I want to use the last three days to do varibles in math because it's a light and easy way to end this intense moth. Also, I have a project I'm working on that needs care and attention.

Witch's Butter

Name:

Tremella Mensenterica (A.K.A. Witch's Butter)

Description:

Looks kind of like marmalade on a log. If you poke it with a pin the inner juices will pour out. Is more yellow in color.

Comments:

Legend has it that this is called Witch's Butter because if you found it on your walk way, it ment you were under the hex of a witch. The only way to break the spell was to poke it with a pin to let the juice run out, killing the fungi. It devolps on hardwood that still have the bark. They are parasitic on wood decay fungi, like Stereum or Aleurodiscus. There is a second type of fungi that is also known as Witch's Butter called Dacrymyces palmatus, which is more orange in color and gorows on dead pine trees with the bark stripped off. Both varieties are edible only after they have been steamed and boiled. Can be found over North America, Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia from May to November. For a more detailed and fun account of this mushroom, visit Tom Volk's Fungus.

Vectors of the Blogosphere.

I thought for V-Day it would be good to explore vectors. But instead of exploring the basics of vectors (They are lines that represent the magnitude of a force in physics. There, I saved you a 30 minute video on youtube) I thought it would be more interesting to explore the surface of the blogosphere riding on the back of mathematical vectors.
A vector in physics represents the magnitude of a force, and there are many ways in which these forces can interact geometrically. But since vectors exist in imaginary 2 dimensional space, mathematicians can represent them with complex numbers. Or numbers. Or pineapples, really, just have a good proof behind you and use pineapples for math. "Mathematics rests on numbers, but is not limited to them" - Why Beauty is Truth.
A vector can be represented in the way of [x,y]. In imaginary space, that represents a point. For shits and giggles though, that can be called point a, and now the vector can be represented by [a]. So what if that point did not exist in imaginary space, but instead resided in the Blogosphere?
In blog-o-space, I will choose myself to represent the first point, not out of narcissism, but because Rene Descartes laid the ground work to determine self existence in his famous work Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (the one that said "I think therefore I am"). If I am a point in blog-o-space, then some of the rules of The Elements apply to the problem at hand. If I am a point, represented by [me], then I can big another blogger for the sake of argument and call them [u]. The blogger u is a complex person full of dreams, desires, and dread and, as a complex person, is the product of a real person and an imaginary person, and therefore is point in space. A vector exists between these two star-crossed bloggers, and the vector can be represented by [me, u]. This is Euclid's 1st postulate:

It is possible to draw a straight line from any point to another point.

Euclid's second postulate claims that we extent this finite line into an infinite line. To do this, we need more points in space. These points are also bloggers in blog-o-space. We'll say that we can extend the line using the bloggers we follow and the bloggers who follow us. For a vector of меня, it is represented as

[me, u, dupree, . . . blogger_n]

By describing the blog-o-space in our own geometry, we can assume some other rules in vector anlaysis apply. There exist an infinite amount of vectors through a point. We can add vectors together - If vector меня has a vector length of 3 bloggers and vector твой has a vector length of 5 bloggers, together they make vector свой with a vector length of 8 bloggers. Two vectors intersect at a common point -

меня - [me, u, dupree]  and твой - [u, mark, jessica] intersects at point  u.

From Wikipedia

If the blog-o-space is just a zoomed in version of the Blogosphere, then Euclid's 5th does not apply because this space exist on the surface of a curved object, most likely a sphere. There are no parallel lines, as all lines in spherical geometry are are great circles and intersect at some point. I call this Bacon's Proof from the parlor game of "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" and the intersection of points on the Blogosphere can be found in accordance to the rules of the game.
1. Pick a blogger. Sadly, I can not find a blog for Kevin Bacon. This blogger you choose and their corresponding vector will be our test vector.
2. Using your own point, use the "shortest path algorithm"  to plot a vector between yourself and blogger x. Write the vector as [x₁, x₂, x₃, x₄,. . . x_n], where x is a point in blog-o-space.
3. Continue the first two steps for as long as you want.
What you should find is that all vectors intersect at some point. For example, you the reader and me the reader probably find our vectors intersecting at the A to Z challenge. Or The Insecure Writer's Group.
This can be developed further. If you promote your blog through other means other that the Internet, these readers can be looked at as other dimensions to the sphere. You may able to create objects within this blog-o-space, and rotate them further. Fractals and patterns may emerge from the chaos of the connecting vectors. The possibilities of this geometry are limited to your imagination.

T-U is for combining posts!

I wanted to write about Thymine and Uracil, but I've very busy working, working on a different project, and playing the distracting game of Fort Conquer on my phone to do the necessary research on these two very complicated chemicals. For now, let's pretend I explained it and it was very moving and passionate and try a different U-T post.
Today's post will be about the wonderful world of Utility Trucks, or Ute's as they are called in New Zealand. I was there for 2 months, and honestly could not figure out what made a truck a Ute, and what made it a truck. I finally decided that pick-ups were Ute's, because no one ever used the word pick-up while I was there.
The trucks were so god-damn cool though! When I see mini-trucks being used for main transportation, I always smile because they are powerful for their size (we used to use 3 cylinder mini-trucks to pull wagons 2 times their size up steep Vermont hills when I was a farmer). But I loved the fact that so many trucks, big and small, were diesel. They trucks needed for roads that were under water or climbed 3000 ft into the air. These trucks looked cool and felt cool when you drove them. There. There is my busy half-assed T-U post. I promise something thought out tomorrow.

S is for sodium acetate

It's time for a Monday Morning Hangover! You might be asking "Oh, my head! Why do I feel like crap? Why do I continue to abuse myself everyday? When did my life go so downhill?"
I can't give you all the answers (suck it up and take some aspirin like rest of us, you baby) but the reason why your head hurts is the subject of today's A  to Z post!
Sodium Acetate is an electrolyte with the chemical formula of CH3COONa or NaOAc for short. It is the sodium salt of acetic acid, which many of you may know as Vinegar. It is used in many things, like flavoring for salt and vinegar potato chips, or neutralizing sulfuric acid waste streams.
Now, the real reason for a hangover headache is speculated, moving from dehydration to cogeners, byproducts of alcohol fermentation. But it is worth noting that studies done by injecting rats with 20 to 60 mg per body weight of sodium acetate caused the same photosensitive headaches that occur during migraines and hangovers. This simulated the oxidation of ethanol in the liver to create acetate. None of this information is helping you feel less queasy though.
As it turns out, Sodium Acetate is surprisingly easy to make in your kitchen, in case you want to become an ametuer chemist. When you a purified form, you can create hot ice, which has a crystallization process that is really cool to watch. It's an exothermic reaction, which means that it produces energy as apposed to ice which draws in energy in order to form. So it becomes hot when it begins to crystallize. Really, crystals from a science standpoint are pretty damn cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC-KOYQsIvU - Watch a video on how to make Hot Ice.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0015963

R is for Saturday morning posts

R is for reality, whether or not it exists.
     In science, you are asked to look at the world around you, make observation about how the world works, and use math as a way to reason out predictions. But, what if our observations on the world around us are unreliable? We rely on our senses to relay information to us, but we can often fool the senses and the brain. Our sense are not infallible. Look at the classic "rubber hand illusion" and observe how our sense of body ownership can be tricked. Illusions and magic tricks have amazed us for centuries. What I'm trying to say is can you trust own observation of the world. How can we trust ourselves? We can compare these ideas to the observation of others, and build a view of the world from that. In a way this may work, because as one person we can only see one part of life, but others will also give us more pices to the puzzles.
We are put upon this earth and asked to sort out the chaos and madness around us, yet the tools we are given may or may not be defective. How do we know this is a real world, or is this just a world that we create for ourselves? Do other minds exist, or is the idea of being an individual an illusion? At our level, the actions of others seem chaotic and messy, but when we change perspective, what was once random now makes sense. An example would be viewing our actions from a historical view, or seeing how people move from a birds eye view.
Patterns emerge in the chaos, and the world begins to make sense.
Well, enjoy your Saturday. Listen to the Kingston Trio.

Q is for Quaternions.

Science week in Philadelphia this week! They have stuff for kids and adults! Go! I'll be hanging out at some events.

Going from phi, a simple concept most people with no interest with math understand, to quaternions, which actually has three complex numbers in it.

Quaternion Basics

A quaternion is a four-element vector that can be used to encode any rotation in a 3D coordinate system.  Technically, a quaternion is composed of one real element and three complex elements, and it can be used for much more than rotations.

There you, a basic introduction to quaternions. You see, they're a vector. . . which have elements . . . this one has four . . .  complex elements. . . mumble. . .what the hell does that paragraph say?
From the beginning complex numbers are scary. For a complex number, you need an imaginary number, the memory of which might haunt your nightmares if you ever took high school math. Remember the square root of negative one, except you can't get the square root of a negative number? This is a hour long conversation in itself, but for the purpose of discussion forget about high school math. All I want you to remember is x + yi = [x,y] which I hope you remember from third grade is points on a Cartesian plane. Yes, imaginary numbers can be used to plot points in imaginary space, which you might recognize as a place that unicorns and dragons live. I love the history of imaginary numbers because it's full of sarcastic mathematicians saying sarcastic things like "Well, since you can't square a negative number, then you can call it whatever you want! It doesn't really exist!" or "If you can just add complex numbers together to plot imaginary space, why don't you just do it to infinity?"
xi is called a complex number, because it's dark and mysterious and it will never let you in, even though you just want to love it! Also, i by itself is meaningless. You can't add it to itself, i + i, because it's the square root of negative one, so it's pretty useless. You have to multiply it by itself for it to actually do anything. I know this doesn't make sense, I might have to write a "history of i" soon. It's one of my favorite stories. So x+yi allows us to plot objects in 2 dimensional space. A quaternion allows us to plot points in 3D. A mathematician got the idea to add a number to three complex numbers in order to graph 3D space, which led to a friend asking him what's to stop someone from adding them forever. And now octonions exist, which are 7 or so complex numbers. *sigh* We can't even picture a dimension like that!
A quaternion looks like a + bi + cj + dk, where i, j, and k are all imaginary numbers. You can structure it like a vector, which I'll talk about on V-day, and you'll get points in 3D space. So you can build Dreamatorium Community style, and use quaternions to figure out where everything is.
Really sorry about this post. Complex numbers and imaginary numbers are hard for anyone to grasp. If you have any questions, send me a message on Google+ or ask about it in the comments.

The golden ration comes in at P.

Source

The question of whether math imitates nature or if the inverse is true has been a question often asked by mathematical philosophers for ages. When you look at nature long enough, patterns begin to emerge: cells and bacteria multiply according to certain formulas, unless x happens, and then the pattern changes slightly as it moves on; flowers and trees grow in fractal patterns as they grow; and then there's Phi.
There is always some type of math people who don't like math know, and for the spiritual, that is phi. Phi is a ratio that is described as (1 + sqrt(5))/2, or an irregular number of 1.6180339887. . . and that ratio is often found in nature. If you were to encase a creature in box, more often than not that box would fit the proportions of phi.  Our little friend the penguin there demonstrates that his markings fall along his phi ratio. Flowers grow their petals at an angle of phi. As a logarithmic spiral, it can be seen in sea shells, pine cones, and snails. So what does it mean?

Source

 It can mean whatever you want to mean. Your world is product of the conclusions you draw from experience and the influence of the world around us. I know what a world full of chaos and order means to me at this point in my life, but that's not to say it will not change as the years go on. In fact, I expect it to.

Omphalotus Olearius

Name:

Omphalotus Olearius (A.K.A. The Jack-O-Lantern Mushroom)

Description:

A bright orange mushroom that has gills that glow in the dark. Visually similar to chanterelles.

Comments:

They are poisonous! Symptoms include blurred vision, cramps, and diarrhea. They are not lethal, but really, that does not sound like a lot of fun. Look at that picture above though. It glows in the dark. This is due to an enzyme called luciferase that acts on a compound called lucifern, also found in fireflies.