50 Years of Legos!

Check out Google's logo for today. Happy 50th birthday LEGO!

SpaceShip2

Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShip2, the successor to SpaceShip1, winner of the X-Prize.

Adventures At School

I was hesitant to take the Multivariable Statistics class as it has been some time sense I had a math class. The last one was the third term of calculus five years ago. So far I have been doing all right until today when the professor put a symbol on the board that we all dread. THE SQUIGGLE.

On a slightly more adventurous note I just found out how extensive the returning Mentor application is. Before it was just a simple form to fill out. It all changed this year as the returning application is almost more extensive than the one I originally did. One of the requirements on this monster is e-portfolio. We made such a thing in my mentor development training but has long sense been delete when I moved to Site5 from Dreamhost. It didn't look that good anyways. I've been meaning to put together a professional site for some time and this may be a good opportunity to do so.

Watch It High

http://www.paramount.com/startrek/

Seems they are going viral like Cloverfield

Article I Section 2

Article I
Section 2

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

(Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.) (The previous sentence in parentheses was modified by the 14th Amendment, section 2.) The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five and Georgia three.

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Age Again

I'm 24 years old.

I AM EXCITED!!!!

As in: OMG!!!!!!!!!! CAN IT BE CHRISTMAS NOW?!?!?!?!
And Justin, don't show Dad until I get home Sunday! Keep it hush hush!

The Final Frontier

Yes. Official. A real teaser trailer will open with Cloverfield tomorrow.

Change of Address

I am staring at the web page to change my mailing address for my bank, and surprisingly I am having a difficult time just popping in to change it. It has always been my address for almost all of my near 24 years of life. Always pointing home. The woes of being sentimental.

A Whole New Half World

We have only been to Mercury once. It was a flyby probe named Mariner 10 that photographed only 45% of the surface before it ran out of fuel and shut down. Despite sharing the title of second closest orbit to us with Mars, we never could get good photos of it due to its proximity to the sun in the sky. The Hubble's optics would fry under those conditions.

This all changed two days ago when the MESSENGER probe began its series of flybys. Take a look. It reminds me a lot of our moon.

In a bit of more space news, the blind are now able to experience space images for the first time.

Healthy People, Healthy Places

I have returned to being a University Studies Mentor. For those who do not attend Portland State University, I function as a supplemental instructor for the liberal arts classes where the main class is broken up into three groups which each meet with me for an hour once a week in a small computer lab. It is a sweet lab considering it is one of the only ones with a projector installed.

The course is Healthy People, Healthy Places, a class which takes a look at health and its relationship with urban planning. The professor is from the School of Urban Planning in the architecture department. Our relationship so far is the most stressed so far. She holds the previous mentor she had in very high regard, and I am probably being compared to.

The grades for Mentor session only count for 5% of their total grade (they do not get an individual grade from me on their transcript). I found in my previous experiences that the criteria I often use for grading their work is often different than the professor's. As a result I developed a simple participation grading scheme: One point for having their body in the room, another for being on time, and two more based on the quality of their participation.

Another challenge I face is that my curriculum is the most prescribed than it has been in the past. For example, I would like to spend some time and dive into exponential grow and decay. It is a concept many people don't understand or have misconceptions. I think it is quite relavent from a planning perspective. The main professor was not a fan. She is the boss so I will follow her requests.

Despite some of these challenges returning to this job will provide me with both money (free school AND a small paycheck!) and needed experience in a classroom. I'll be posting more of my thoughts and ideas about my pedagogy as it comes up.

Building a Heart

Source

SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.

The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton” that created its shape was left.

Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor” cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.

The remainder is in the article. All the dreams and nightmares that can come from this.

Article I

Article. I. - The Legislative Branch Note

Section 1 - The Legislature

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

We The People

As the primary elections sweep across the United States it dawned on me that I have never read the Constitution of my nation. Never at any level of my schooling or on my own. Heck, I've seen the actual hand written parchment, but never read it. I like to think I understand the basics of how the United States government operates, but the fact of the matter is I never read the 4,543 word document. It isn't that daunting in length; the report for my high school senior project was about that long. Lord knowns I've written papers that were longer in University. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting the fundamental laws that govern the land. No other laws can violate the Constitution unless it is amended. That is a process that, well, we'll see when we get there. For now we will start the at the top, the Preamble, the why this is being written in the first place.

Preamble

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Winter 2008

My winter term for 2008 has finally been finalized. I am taking the first term of multi variable statistics as a refresher for my thesis. I really miss actual math; I haven't had any for four years now. Something is just comforting about numbers coming together into something meaningful. Some of the people are quite distracting due to their level of attractiveness. Hot nerds. Yum.

To continue my geology and space science theme I am taking a class in meteorites as well. One classmate took the Scanning Electron Microscopy course with me last year. His thesis is in meteorology and dominates discussion with a smug look on his face. This annoys me as a large portion of the grade is in class participation. I have little background in mineralogy which puts me as a disadvantage. I manage to slip in when my background in the other sciences help.

To top it all off, I am a University Studies Mentor again. But those will deserve their own posts.

Primaries

Everyone and their mother's have something to say about the upcoming election. This is a sign of the importance of this upcoming election. For that reason I feel i have little to contribute to the international conversation. With little regret I haven't followed the Republican debate too closely. The only one of interest is Ron Paul and while I think his isolationism would be very detrimental to the nation and the world, the push for a more streamlined federal government is definitely something to push to. Yet at the same time I am for Universal Heathcare =p

I must say that for each debate Ms. Clinton is growing on me. However if she were to be elected this country would have spent two decades, an entire generation, under a Bush or Clinton. This is NOT what the Founding Fathers wanted.

Close to every year I take a political orientation test called the Political Compass. This 5 minute test breaks apart the traditional left/right metric into two dimensions: Economic from Left to Right and Social Libertarian vs Authoritarian on the vertical axis. In high school I was around -5,-5 (right economics and social libertarian) but have become more extreme the longer Bush has been in office. During the 2006 election I was -8.00 in economics and -8.72 in social liberties. I just took the test again for the 2008 primaries and I maintained my general region as -8.38 in econ and -8.05 social liberties. Still chilling in the part of the graph with Ghandi. What is very interesting is how distant I am from all the leading candiates. They are not as liberal as they claim.

Div Tags and Boyfriends

CSS is kicking my ass. The idea is to have a brown background behind both the left blog section and the links on the right contained in a simple div tag who's sole contents are div left and div right and their contents. The problem is that the green background shows through instead, the colour set in the body section of the css. Also the brown does not appear on the right side to go to the bottom at all. I tried to set the height to 100% manually but there was no effect. The problem is that the length of the page is variable depending on the lengths of the posts made. I may change the structure of the page slightly to get the effect I am looking for as nested div tags don't seem to behave like I want.

To drastically change the focus of this post I will now talk about my experience living with a boyfriend for the first time. I've never been able to get a hang of the whole living with someone thing. I have this impression that when I have company over I should focus all of my energy on them. They are included in everything I do, I make sure they are always entertained, if I need to use the bathroom I excuse myself and make sure I am as brief as possible, and so on and so forth. This extended to my relationships as, until recently, my time spent with various significant others were somewhat of an investment as I would have to negotiate getting a car from my parents, not being able to go over or them come over when it was convenient for them or me. Or because it takes an hour to go see them. So I am going to be damned sure my time is well spent.

But now he is here, all the time. It has only been a few days but I still feel guilty when I go off to play a computer game or read a book. I here a clink in the kitchen and I feel guilty for not doing it first. Or he goes off to do his own thing and then I'm terrified he is bored and I am not doing enough. Perhaps I should get to bed at a decent hour.

Internet!