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Views of Santa Barbara

ben — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 06:44:12 -0600

Santa Barbara, California is a beautiful town. I went to school there and when I can, try to visit…though now I live in Boston, which makes it difficult.

Job qualification: Not a jerk

ben — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:06:55 -0600

Having gone through an institutional hiring process—both as the hirer and the hiree—I am well aware of the intricacies of non-discriminatory practices. Essentially: you can’t base your decision on anything outside of the approved job description and qualifications. Regardless, I got a hoot out of the following qualification on a job my friend sent me:

Employee must be able to relate to other people beyond giving and receiving instructions: works well with co-workers or peers without exhibiting behavioral extremes; perform work activities requiring negotiating, instructing, supervising, persuading or speaking with others; and respond appropriately to criticism from a supervisor.

Vegan Baking Tips: Egg Replacement and Oil

ben — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:27:31 -0600

During an AmeriCorps icebreaker, I matched my desire to learn vegan baking with someone who knew how. Who say’s icebreakers are worthless (well, I sometimes do). I got the following two tips:

Egg Substitute: Use an amount of water equal to an egg (maybe ~1/4 cup) and mix in tablespoon of ground flax-seed

Best Oil: Coconut Oil is the best oil to use for moistness and tastiness. Of course, it’s really bad for you, but who cares.

Fluoride, teeth and brushing advice

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:38:36 -0600

Ever since Dr. Strangelove I’ve found the fluoride controversy interesting and scary (for many reasons). I can’t verify any of this, but from a Digg article entitled Fluoride’s glory may be cresting, here was a comment that seemed to have enough info to worthwhilely put it here:

Fluoride replaces the hydroxyl ion in the naturally occurring calcium hydroxyapatite causing a stronger nuclear bond. In that respect it strengthens the tooth. The problems associated with flouride come from poor understanding of the inherent dangers of ingestion.

When it comes to toothpaste, I alternate a flouride containing paste with a paste containing sodium-calcium phosphosilicate which adheres to the surface of the tooth enamel creating new calcium hydroxyapatite. It does this by a simple mechanism. The sodium raises the ph of the saliva which causes the calcium and phosphorous to plate out of solution onto the tooth and re nourishing any damaged areas.

Line up in order of your SSN

ben — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:17:13 -0600

The IRS is using the last two digits of your Social Security Number to determine when you’ll receive your Economic Stimulus (e.g. free money i.e. your children’s money).

Paper checks will also go out based on Social Security number. For Social Security numbers ending in 00 through 09, the paper checks will be mailed starting May 9 and will continue through May 16. A similar process will be repeated in the following weeks.

Please allow additional delivery time, perhaps 3 to 5 days, since the paper checks are being sent through the mail.
PAPER CHECK

Last two SSN digits:
Payments will be mailed no later than (and received a few days after):
00 through 09 May 16
10 through 18 May 23
19 through 25 May 30
26 through 38 June 6
39 through 51 June 13
52 through 63 June 20
64 through 75 June 27
76 through 87 July 4
88 through 99 July 11

Setting up Octave and Gnuplot on OSX

ben — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:37:47 -0600

I just started auditing a Mathematical Models in Biology class and Matlab is one of the requirements. I had relatively good experience with the free, open source alternative,Octave back in college, but then I was running Linux, not OSX. It took me about an hour to figure out how to set it up (I was a little worried for a bit).

Download the Octave binary for OSX from Octaveforge.
Install Octave and Gnuplot (in the extras folder). I just dragged them to /Applications (X11 is required for Gnuplot—should be found on OSX install disk)
Set the environment variable for gnuplot (Octave is supposed to do this automatically, but it didn’t for me):
sudo ln -s /Applications/GnuPlot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot
(thanks for the help, Toby)
Download and install (again in /Applications) Aquaterm which will actually render the gnuplot graphs.
Within Gnuplot, set the renderer: “terminal aqua”
Try it out in Octave (I had to restart Octave and Gnuplot to get it all to work):
x = linspace(-pi, pi, 100); y = sin(x); plot(x, y);

Thank you: High Performance Computing for Mac OS X, the Octave Wiki and Google for helping me find what I needed.

Setting up Octave and Gnuplot on OSX

ben — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:37:47 -0600

Download the Octave binary for OSX from Octaveforge.
Install Octave and Gnuplot (in the extras folder). I just dragged them to /Applications (X11 is required for Gnuplot—should be found on OSX install disk)
Set the environment variable for gnuplot (Octave is supposed to do this automatically, but it didn’t for me):
sudo ln -s /Applications/GnuPlot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot
(thanks for the help, Toby)
Download and install (again in /Applications) Aquaterm which will actually render the gnuplot graphs.
Within Gnuplot, set the renderer: “terminal aqua”
Try it out in Octave (I had to restart Octave and Gnuplot to get it all to work):
x = linspace(-pi, pi, 100); y = sin(x); plot(x, y);

Thank you: High Performance Computing for Mac OS X, the Octave Wiki and Google for helping me find what I needed.

Understanding Beliefs (and how to change them)

admin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:03:45 -0700

It’s the holiday season which seems to make a lot of people think about beliefs. I’m thinking about this great book on my desk entitled Communication Planning: An Integrated Approach by Sherry Devereaux Ferguson and reading the section on understanding the psychology of audiences (Chapter 7).

Citing social psychologist Milton Rokeach the book outlines five belief types:

Type A - Worldview beliefs: These beliefs constitute basic truths: physical (”This is a cat”), social reality (”I live in Boston”), and nature of the self (”I am a man”). These beliefs are nearly impossible to change.
Type B - Personal beliefs: These are ego centered and internally formed. Usually self-evaluations (”I’m intelligent”), they can also be phobias or delusions (”I’m fat”).
Type C - Authority beliefs: These beliefs are formed because of an outside authority, or in opposition to that authority (”I’ll accept that because the president said it” or “I’ll disbelieve that because the president said it”).
Type D - Beliefs emanating from authority figures: These beliefs are formed indirectly by the actions of authority figures (People’s distrust of Richard Nixon led them to distrust the office of the President and of government and politics in general).
Type E - Matters of taste: These are arbitrary or essentially inconsequential opinions. While these beliefs may be defended just as strongly as more central beliefs, individuals will more readily relinquish them them. (”This is the best ice cream”). Examples are product preferences or brand allegiances.

So what? Most commercial messages concern Type E beliefs and most advertising takes the form of linking Type E beliefs with more core belief types. For example:

Linking Type E to Type B: These usually take the form of convincing the individual that use of a product or service will have a personal affect upon them (”Drinking this soda will make you popular” or “If you are athletic, you should use this deodorant”)
Linking Type E to Type C: Connecting matters of taste to an authority is usually the domain of the testimonial or endorsement.

Boston Vegetable Planting Chart

admin — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:25:23 -0600

I made a simple chart of approximate seed planting times for Boston (USDA Zone 6). You can download a printable PDF of the planting chart.

Today I put together a simple raised bed in my backyard. I built it along the same design as the Food Project’s Build-a-Garden Program’s planter—which my landlord participated in last year. Other than shoveling 1300 pounds of soil needed for an 8 x 4 raised bed, it was pretty easy. The only really novel part is putting a sheet of weed-block between the ground and the planting soil to keep the vegetables from growing down into polluted city-dirt.

Brompt is a blog reminder

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:34:47 -0600

Two weeks ago I launched a new website at Brompt.com. It’s a web-based service for unreliable bloggers (like myself) that sends you an email if you haven’t posted to your blog in a while. It’s sort’ve like HassleMe, except Brompt actively scans your blogs RSS feed to only send reminders when you’re lax (as opposed to just sending you a reminder every so often).

It’s very practical, but I also think Brompt is really interesting conceptually too. Everyone talks about RSS as just a means to aggregating content, but there is so much other interesting metadata in an RSS feed too.

Right now the site is just the barebones service, but I’m planning on adding some statistics and such so you can track your unreliability. It’s a fun project with a lot of possibilities.