Steven Chu

I have seen Steven Chu give a couple talks, and had mostly good memories of his knowledge on energy policy. Reading up on the man a little more and I don't think Obama could have found a person who agrees with me more. He seems to acknowledge some simple truths that Obama never seemed to really grasp. For example he has publically stated that we should replace our coal fired plants with nuclear ones. He does this mostly because he realizes that coal power plants are not only releasing more Mercury, Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur, and Nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, but they release a hundred times as much radiactivity into the environment! There really is no environmental justification to stop building nuclear plants until we replace every coal plant we have.

On the biofuels front I typically find him to be the weakest. He however seems to at least know what he is up against though which is better than I get from most people. He directly points out just how much more land you need to get an equal amount of energy from biofuels than from solar cells, and at least isn't an advocate for corn ethanol. Still, he still seems to advocate advanced biofuels that depend upon the 0.1% photosynthetic effeciency of green plants which to me seems a pretty silly black hole to drop money down.

Overall though, he has the ability to just stand up and tell things like they are even if they are unpopular. No one has questioned the existence of greenhouses in hundreds of years; pretending like switching the silicon dioxide in a greenhouse panel with the most chemically similar molecule in existence, carbon dioxide, somehow completely changes this basic physics is silly. The greenhouse effect is real and the only debate we need to be having is how much we are willing to live with and what we are going to do. One of the nice things about having a Noble prize in physics is you have instant credibility. This throws a real wrench into the hire-a-scientist tactics that seem to be standard policy for lobbyists. In order to be taken seriously they have to find a scientist of the caliber of Steven Chu, which in politically charged issues will not be easy.

And life moves in the right direction

My cell phone was returned, my car is running again(it needed a new battery), my defense went well (I actually have to finish writing my thesis, but my committee signed off on my research/presentation so finishing writing the thesis is merely a formality at this point), and two of my four grades are posted, both A's.

Sounds like things are moving in the right direction at least.

and that makes two of them

Well, I had a hole in my pocket, and now I have neither a cell phone nor any idea where to find it. I guess that makes two of them.

I really have no idea what I will be doing about that, buying two iphones a year isn't really an option but they catch you in a contract so it will be a real pain to get a phone that people will actually return to you when it is lost.

I may not use open office again

So, I am writing my thesis and things seem to be going fairly well. But I decided to save it and reopen it because I seemed to have hit some setting I don't know how to get out of otherwise. I then reopen my document and find that every single image and has been deleted! It will take me at least an hour to return it to the state it was previously in! Apparently it is a known problem, and essentially the only solution is to simply not work in microsoft word formatting.

Not using .doc files seems absurd to me, no one knows what to do with a .odt file when you send them, which I have done by accident resulting in wasted time on both the part of me and the professor I sent it to. Even worse I have had one experience where I went to a presentation accidentally bringing an open office formatted presentation and it forced me to give the talk cold, without slides. Since that point in time I have religiously used the microsoft formating as a way to avoid any problems. Now that I know using microsoft formating can cause equally bad problems that leaves me with only one reasonable choice, come up with a real copy of microsoft office as soon as I can. I suppose since I am done with school this may become less important quite quickly though.

Almost done

My thesis defense is scheduled for next Tuesday. As I am not happy with my presentation, thesis, or lab work this may just be the most stressful week of my life. After that will be time for something completely different.

List of marine aquarium fish species

I decided to use the break to categorize and list every fish commonly kept in marine aquariums. Actually, I am not quite there, I haven't even touched the sections on angelfish, butterfly fish, and a few others. Still, I managed to bring Wikipedia's List of Marine Aquarium Fish Species from this, to this. I probably doubled the number of fish on it, and similarly the number of pictures.

Atomic Bomb Dome

This is a particularly eerie sight. After the nuclear blast in Hiroshima the locals took the nearest building to the blast that managed to stay standing and left it as a memorial. Now the city has been mostly rebuilt, but there is still the Atomic Bomb Dome sitting in the middle of the city.