Category: Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.

In anticipation of my move to Seattle, I began the joyous task of packing. Here is a picture of some of my packed boxes.

Know what’s in all of them? Books. Twenty six boxes of books. Plus probably another three or four boxes at work. I guess that’s what I get for being a literature and physics major, eh?

I went to Caltech (for God’s sake, not “CalTech”) as an undergrad to be a prankster. Seriously. Along the way, I may have also learned a thing or two. For many Techers during my stay at Caltech, the ever increasing threats of litigation against us merry pranksters and the lack of the administration being supportive of our dangerous acts of creativity were quite a dissapointment. So it’s great to see that the pranking days of Caltech are far from over. This last week was MIT’s prefrosh weekend. MIT, of course, is that other Tech school, who seems to think they are in some way superiour to the paradise known as Caltech. Seeing as how such clearly misguided arrogance should never be allowed to stand, some Caltech students decided to set the record straight with a series of pranks (which MIT students, in some blatant neural misfunction, label “hacks”.) The Techers distributed shirts to the MIT prefrosh which read “Because not everybody can go to Caltech.” They turned a large “MASSACHVSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY” sign (which, by the way, clearly shows signs that at MIT you don’t need to know how to spell to get into the school) into a “THAT OTHER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.” They also used a laser display to display the letters “C-A-L-T-E-C-H” on the top of a building. Pictures are here.
Is this the beginning of a renewed rivalry between these two elite schools? Will students again start flaming (that’s Tech speak for failing out) because of hours spent planning revenge? We can only hope so.

Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans – John Lennon

Over a year ago, my father passed away. A few weeks after this happened, my mom and I had to take my sister to San Francisco to see about the deteriorating condition of my sister’s kidney. Cathy, my sister, is handicapped, having some sort of syndrome which doctors have really never been able to identify (she is about three feet tall, has one side bigger than the other, and is the joy of my family.) Over the next few months, the doctors we saw became more and more concerned about her kidney until a little over half a year ago, she had a tube inserted in her abdominal cavity and went onto dialysis.
My mom and my sister live in the town where I grew up, Yreka, California, a small town of around 7000 people in very northern California. Because of my sister’s size, the doctors she needed where pediatric nephrologists. Needless to say there aren’t any such specialists in Yreka, the closest being located in San Francisco (five hours south) and in Portland (five hours north.) The stress of taking care of my sister (hooking her up to the dialysis machine, worrying about infection, etc.) was (and is) quite a stress on my mother, especially with my dad just recently passing away. (Oh, and if you want to more bad news on top of all this death and kidney failure, my mom had to put down our family dog during the same time period. When it rains, it pours. On us it poored ugly mad muck.)
So while all of this was happening, I realized that I needed to get closer to Yreka or to get my mom and sister closer to me. There was also the problem that living in Yreka was looking like less and less of a viable option for my mom and sister. Which is hard because my mom has lived in Yreka for thirty some-odd years. Adding another element to the equation, my two cousins on my mom’s side both live in Seattle, Washington, a place with good pediatric nephrology and a reasonable place for my mom to move to. There is also the consideration of a kidney transplant and me and my cousin’s being in Seattle would make it the easiest place to pursue this avenue. So I then began a quest to see if there was someway that I could get myself to Washington. Needless to say, the last year has been filled with more than a few days in which I contemplated whether I would be able to continue my career in academia. The choice was always easy, in that I knew that if I could help my mom and my sister, and that this meant that I couldn’t continue along my career in academia, well then helping was clearly the right decision. The combination of not considering leaving academia as being a failure was, however, fighting dearly with my desire to continue to do the work that I so love.
Fortune, however, finally decided to smile upon my family. The smile came in the form of Professor Mark Oskin and the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department. I’m happy to announce that I will be starting a position as a Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Washington starting May 1st. I am very very excited about this move, not only for bringing some much needed relief to my family, but also because I really like the CS&E department at UW and was excited by the interest expressed towards quantum computing by those I talked to when I visited the campus a few months back. I’m beyond so far lucky to get this opportunity, it makes winning the lottery seem reasonable.
There is, of course, some sadness at having to leave the Santa Fe Institute so soon. When I moved here, I imagined that I would be spending two years in Santa Fe. The people at SFI are truely awesome and the diversity of such a small place is pretty astounding. Plus SFI has an attitude which says that one must push the boundaries in order to do really good science and that the big questions are what you should be working on, not the small routine science. But mostly I will miss the people from SFI-tea time listening to them discuss life, the universe, and everything will be dearly missed (not to mention the amazing number of snacks at the SFI tea time!)
And so, another chapter begins. Oh, and if anyone knows of a two bedroom two bath apartment within reasonable distance of UW, let me know!

Happy New Year!

Last week, my friend Luis came through town, with…a two faced calf named “Unique”:

We went for drinks at the Pink Adobe, $3 cover charge, the band playing loud Led Zeppin covers, and then some of my collegues from the Santa Fe Institute wanted to see what Luis had in the back of his big SUV in a trash can. In the dark parking lot behind the bar, Luis and crew unfolded from its plastic rapper the two faced calf. 17 days it lived, too short, I say, too short. We gathered around, freezing in the cold Santa Fe night, to stare at the two faced calf which itself was frozen and packed in ice. And the entire time, as we gawked and stared, the security guard stationed in the parking lot, he didn’t move a bit.
Somedays, life feels like it should be part of a novel. Other days, it seems even more interesting.

Ever wonder what peronsality disorders you have. Via Pharyngula I have come across the totally unscientific, but interesting Personality Disorder Test.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Moderate
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Low
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Moderate
— Personality Disorder Test – Take It! —

It looks like I’m a self-centered clown with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Jez, this test makes it sound like I’m Woody Allen.

When I was in high school I taught myself the physics necessary to take the AP physics exam. I did this by taking a physics textbook and doing all of the problems which had solutions in the back of the book. At the time I was doing this, I had just discovered Dire Straits “Brothers in Arms” album and that is ALL that I listened to when I was working on these problems. When I went off to college, I was sitting in my dorm room one day when I put on the Dire Straits and all of the sudden I notice I had this amazing urge to do physics problems. I had trained myself to do physics whenever I heard that one CD. It was as if Pavlov’s dogs had suddenly learned to do physics.
So now I actually use this technique to get work done. I play a single album or a single song over and over again when I’m working on a particular subject. Then, if I ever have a problem getting working on that particular topic, I pull out the appropriate song and whamo, I can’t help myself from getting work done.
Here is this month’s song for conditioning myself to get work done:

Placebo: “Protect me from what I want”

It’s that disease of the age
It’s that disease that we crave
Alone at the end of the rave
We catch the last bus home
Corporate America wakes
Coffee republic and cakes
We open the latch on the gate
Of the hole that we call our home
Protect me from what I want…
Protect me protect me
Maybe we’re victims of fate
Remember when we’d celebrate
We’d drink and get high until late
And now we’re alone
Wedding bells ain’t gonna chime
With both of us guilty of crime
And both of us sentenced to time
And now we’re all alone
Protect me from what I want…
Protect me protect me

There must be a conservation of addictions in the world. Since QIP, I’ve totally given up drinking Diet Coke because John Cortese told me a story about a coworker who went into epipleptic siezures because of the aspertame in the Diet Coke. I’ve gone from around 8 cans of Diet Coke a day to zero. Boy that Turkey sure is feeling cold.
So what have I replaced Diet Coke with? Well tea and coffee, of course. But I’ve also become addicted to the radio station KEXP i.e www.kexp.org.
I’m thinking of performing an expriment where I give up listening to KEXP and see if I start craving Diet Coke.