Last week, I lamented that I didn’t do very well on my statistics final. Later that same day, the professor sent out an email to the whole class talking about how everyone didn’t do very well on the final, and he would do something about it with the scores. I had an A in the class, running up to the take-home midterm (did not do as well on the take-home), and I was pretty confident that I would do better this semester than last. I was worried, when I took the final, that I would instead do worse this semester on statistics. Well, I just checked my grade and it turns out I’ve got a solid A. Awesomeness. </worry><celebration!>…

Saturday afternoon on the 3rd of May, a friend of mine who works in my lab, Ian Prust, got hitched to his fiancée Holly Fralick. An hour away in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, they got married in a catholic church, and held their reception at a nearby inn. Besides their family and close friends attending, there was a substantial contingent of grad students and their significant others present at the festivities. Ariela and I wish them all the best in their new life together. Here’s a picture of the happy couple and their delicious wedding cakes. Read More…

Corn ethanol is inefficient, and isn’t the best for the environment. It’s also pretty much all we have for ethanol biofuel production right now. There’s some talk that corn ethanol is a bad idea (I disagree for infrastructure reasons) right now, in part because it is affecting food prices. Corn for ethanol raises demand for corn, raising the price of corn. More land planted for corn means less for soybeans - so the price of soybeans goes up and people tear down more trees to make room for soybean fields in South America. People start switching to other grains to feed their animals and make their foods, such as wheat. Price of wheat goes up. Well guess which farmers are finding it more profitable to plant wheat? Read More…

I rocked my plant breeding final yesterday afternoon, and today, I have finished my statistics final as well. I’m not sure how well I did on the statistics final, well, because this post was made before I took it. If the rest of the semester is any indication, I shouldn’t have a problem.

As of now, I’ll be off to the field to help my lab-mates finish hand-planting some maize seeds. Don’t get the wrong idea, we won’t be breaking our backs stooping out in the field, we’ll have rocking tools like these ones to plant seeds at regular intervals and depths. Still, it takes some time to do, and I expect my afternoon will be taken up.

This evening, I’ll be making some tablecloths for Ariela’s candle operation (site is coming along, going to add pictures and a shopping cart next week), but I expect I’ll have time to read and respond to comments on the Hume/Kant post. For all those out there who are finishing up their finals, or have yet to take them (I’m so glad I’m not on the quarter system!), may mechanistic causality be tweaked in your favor. (Good Luck!)

Update 17:46: Oy! I could have done better on that stats exam, I came out of it worried about my grade. When I met up with classmates who were also doomed to hand-plant (actually it was fun with the camaraderie) we all breathed a sigh of relief that we weren’t the only ones that were doubtful about it. When I got back, an all-class email was in my inbox from the professor - the class average was way down compared to all the other exams. So it sounds like the grades are going to be weighted - Linear Transformation! Linear Transformation! Goodness of fit stays the same, but the numbers become more meaningful! Maybe I’ll get a bonus point for applying the subject of the class to the grade for the class! Didn’t do so bad after all.

John McDonald, the Director of Student Ministries at Westminster Presbyterian Church, has stopped by my blog to drop a few comments. He has been seen previously at the Florida Citizens for Science blog prodding them with taunts and ill-informed criticisms of evolutionary science.

One of the interesting claims that he has been making repeatedly is that David Hume destroyed Empiricism, and that Immanuel Kant saved science from the pickle Hume put it in. This seemed rather odd, considering that Hume was himself an empiricist - he believed that knowledge derived through observation, rather than pure reason (Descartes et al.) was the way to go. Here are John’s comments on this topic on the KCS blog: Read More…

Episode 69 of the Mindcast is up!

Download it here.

Take the God of the Gaps Mindcast Challenge!

Theme = Star Trek TNG by Dennis McCarthy.

Previously, I mused about my recent busy activities. As if on cue, Jorge Cham of Ph.D. Comics just sketched out what that was like for me.

The Vicious Cycle:

How do they capture grad student life so well and on a daily basis?

A little more than a week ago, I received an email from Marni Chidsey, a librarian at Okaloosa-Walton College in Niceville, Florida. She heard about a “Beyond Expelled” event that was about to take place in her locale, and the speaker was going to be Nancy Pearcey. Yes, that Nancy Pearcey. Mrs Totaluberdoubleplus Truth herself.

Marni emailed me, PZ Myers, Ken Miller, and a few others asking for advice on how to represent science and reason at the event, and what would be a good question to ask. Nick Matzke helped me out with my question then, so it was time to pay it forward. I sent her a few good proposed questions for her to ask Pearcey, and explained a little background on her arguments and its basic flaws.

Ken Miller sent the both of us a preview of his now-published essay about Expelled and how utterly dishonest it is. Check it out when you have the time. Ken suggested that Marni hand out copies of it if she could, and I asked her to record it if possible. How did it go? Read More…

Hoo boy. I am tired. I’ve had a busy busy month! First, if you recall, I upgraded my hosting account to a virtual server, which was supposed to be moved overnight. We all know how that turned out. Two weeks later, the blog is finally transferred over, and my email works again. Meanwhile, I had a midterm, a term paper, and a take-home midterm. Plus I’ve been sending off samples of amplified DNA to be sequenced so I can work on pinning down my gene. Oh yeah, I got bees, and am planning a wedding!

This week, Ariela and I were making our wedding invitations, and we finished them last night and sent them off by mail today. Just in time to beat the price increase at the post office so we could still use the American Scientist stamps! Right in the middle of all this, on Wednesday, my website shuts down. Again.

At first, I thought it was an issue with server settings. Didn’t seem to be. Then I thought I needed to upgrade my version of wordpress. Only the .php files in the website weren’t working; html placeholder pages, pictures, xml feeds, those were still there. Yup, must be the wordpress, perhaps a compatibility issue with the new server digs. I soon found out that I couldn’t edit my folders on the server - because they were under the control of some other username, not my own, from the transfer. Luckily, that was quickly addressed by Startlogic, luckily for them I should say. Still, no avail, every php file came up blank and useless. Today they tested a separate php file and it worked on its own, and suggested that I reinstall wordpress from scratch.

Great.

That’s what I told the tech support person who was helping me.

Later today, I got a call that our garden plot could be roto-tilled for us if we got ourselves out to the garden, so I finished up planning out my new molecular marker, and took off to get this new time draw underway. Yep, gotta love gardening. Actually, it should be way better than Davis - it rains all summer here in Madison! I can almost forget about it at times. Tilled to shreds, with the help of some fossil fuels, our organic garden plot needed mulch, which took up the next hour.

After dinner, I set myself to the task of finally fixing this everlasting website problem. I deleted all m wordpress files, created a new MySQL database for a new installation of the latest version of wordpress, and uploaded it to be installed. A few short moments later (Their famous 5-minute install is an exaggeration) I was back in business. With an empty blog.

All of my 360+ posts, all the comments, categories, registered users, drafts, pages, settings, blogroll, were sitting in the old database file on the server. Any attempt to link the new wordpress installation to the old database was met with the now-familiar-to-me White Screen of Doom, and I needed a special export of my database made by a functional wordpress installation to import it into the new one! Any attempt to import the old database into the new one was met with insurmountable error messages. A conundrum. Page after page of wordpress support forum topics and questions provided no answer, until I happened upon this page.

It presented a simple plan. Export each table from your old database into a zipped text file, delete the corresponding table from the new, empty database, and import each table one by one. At less than ten tables to export, I thought I would just try one for starters. An export of my “posts” table, a deletion, and an import later and BOOM. Posts restored to the blog instantly. Not ten minutes later I had everything back in, and I proceeded to set up my plugins. Everything except for the video plugin is working again, my theme is back up, I can write posts, and I already had 25 spam comments for me to delete, left over from before the big crash!

Wow, I crunched some sequence data and made something useful out of it. I learned all about MySQL today. I chased down my last (hopefully) server demon and fixed my site again. I [we] got our plot tilled and covered in mulch. I made Lasagna. I’m tired.

Really tired. The last month has been a blur for me, and now that it seems all this craziness is over, there’s still more. We’ve got to fly to California tomorrow to see a fading grandmother who will receive an invitation to a wedding she may not make it to.

Then, next week comes my finals! Yay…

As you can see, I’ve been a little too busy to make new episodes, but that will soon change in the following week.

Hey, this is life, isn’t it, a mixture of boredom, intrigue, work, hobbies, rest, life, death, and bees?

I think its time for me to go to bed. Stay tuned for some news on Saturday.