soapbox

Facebook is a wonderful tool for reminders about birthdays.

Anyway, Happy Birthday from Portland, OR, where the weather is cold and rainy. Hope you have a good one.

I figure I’ll try this resource, too.

what I have: a data file with three columns: frequency, temperature, and “eta”. I want to make a 2D plot of eta vs frequency and temperature, like this:

.

What I have done is to write a code that reads the file and stores the third colum, the eta values, in a 2-D array - so for example, data[12,8]=0.8713. However, I now need to re-scale the axes so that they read from 0.1 to 1 or from 1 to 8 instead of just using the x/y indices (1 to 80, etc). Do people know how to do that? or, maybe instead I should do a scatterplot of z at location [x,y] instead of the surfc command that produced the above image?

thanks.

Just a random news article here. The thing that blows my mind is the claim that 97% of women in Egypt had undergone the surgery in 2000. That’s just insane.

Egypt outlaws all female circumcision

Bush: I’m a little tinkerbell. How did my face get to look so much like a weasel?
Cheney: Ears, I like ears. I like to stick my long snake’s tongue into ears.
Bush: What was I talking about again? I’m a little teapot.
Cheney: My evil plans start when I slide inside his ears with my devil phallus.
Bush: I was reading this amazing book the other day that really made me concerned about China. It was called The Good Earth.
Cheney: The evil power is mine!

So, I’ve been holding out on the iPhone. It’s pretty and all and it would be very nice to be able to check my email remotely, but it’s sort of crazy expensive and there really haven’t been any reviews to say whether it’s actually good or not.

Yesterday, they announced the pricing for the wireless plans and it “only” costs $20 more a month to add unlimited data to my cell account.

Today, the first reviews came in and they’re glowing.

Ugg, even Kirsten is starting to think they look really cool. Luckily we’re leaving on vacation on Friday and will be in the air while the entire stock of iPhones probably sells out. I can only hope because otherwise there’s going to be a very large whole in my wallet.

Wheat Field vs. Coke Fiend Driver + Police Chase = Low Crop Yield.

Wow. Just wow.

Kinda reminds me of the “Spiders on Drugs” experiments from back in the day. (Oddly enough, that links to the webpage of one of the IT guys at my undergrad school.)

And that concludes this edition of strange, yet educational, entertainment!

Not blog spam. I think we’re dealing with that as well as we can. The current spam that makes it into moderation only makes it there because there’s so little message that you can’t even say it’s bad.

I had a very interesting spam experience though over the last couple of days. Apparently, some medium-sized spammer used my dartmouth email address as the “from” address on a big batch of spam. That resulted in several hundred “mail server error” emails being sent back to me that so and so doesn’t have an email address. It turns out that there are some interesting ways to deal with spam. My favorite is an option that bounces spam back but then tells the sender that they can resend the message after adding a number to the subject line. So if it’s a real email, the sender can use their brain to make sure the message gets through.

Anyway, they seem to have stopped using my address, so my email is back to normal.