Hucks Soapbox

Placebo effects were seen in this study with parents and teachers rating childrens' behavior. The interesting part is the adults perception changes regardless of the treatment...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090629165611.htm
just some food for thought - for parents.

Over the past bit life has been very crazy but good. My girlfriend moved in, classes finished up for the summer, we moved to a condo farther from campus and I started working in my thesis lab. Over the last couple days I have started exploring the trails behind the condo and have found there are quite possible enough running trails back there that I might be finding new ones for quite a while. Although we are not supposed to swim in the lake, living farther away from campus and not in a little apartment is definitely an upgrade with more space and lots of trails to play on. The commute to campus also isn't bad - 13 miles which is less than an hour on the bike. A bit of a pointless post here but I'm considering it more of an exercise to get back into writing more often.

Exactly one year from my introduction to skiing Tuckerman's I did it again with Ben (and this time with his friend Zack. No one was quite awake or particularly happy to be doing anything but sleeping so early but we managed to meet in Thetford at 5:30. With only one side trip(DD's for needed carbo loading) before the parking lot at the bottom of Mt. Washington we started hiking a little afer 8am. It took just over an hour to make it to the base of Tuck's then we went up the right side of the headwall. We hoped it would be a little warmer and it was a little hard to kick in a trail to say the least. After resting at the top of the headwall for a bit we went down the right side of it on the steepest part which was a huge adrenaline rush. A little re-grouping at the bottom was promptly followed by summiting. We made it from the summit to the bottom of Tuck's via Right Gully without taking our skis off - a feat which involved a little pain for the bottoms of our skis but well worth it. One more run down Right Gully and we were beat.

After being unimpressed with the bike shop closest to campus I found MVS/Drummond Cycles. They are a little farther from campus but definitely worth the drive for bike-fits, custom bikes and anything tri related. The websites are below.
www.drummondcycles.com and www.mountainvalleysports.com
 

I have had a credit card as a backup for the last while and NEVER used the card. It sat at home. Doing nothing. Never entered into any computer. Then a few days ago my credit card company calls me saying they think I may be the victim of fraud and told me the card #. Sure enough, I did NOT purchase an online subscription to Final Fantasy XI, and frankly I was not exactly sure what that was until I called the company who it was purchased through. Apparently Final Fantasy XI is an online role-playing game similar to better known World of Warcraft that you have to buy subscriptions to. There are only a few ways the hacker could have gotten enough information to purchase this - they need to get my card #, home address and security code on the back of the card. As I have never used this card online and I can't even view my whole account # when logged into the website they didn't get it from a website besides the credit card company if they got it electronically. If they got it physically they came into my apartment and took the card from my desk where it has been sitting for the last several months.

I thought the commentary here was very fitting as I have seen this is several places. While I am decidedly on one side of our nations politics I do generally understand the need for the other as a series of checks and balances which be an cultural phenomenon chosen through evolution - go too far in any one direction and the society fails. Enough of my blabber - go read the article... http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/26/we-are-fractal-sheep.html

As seen on slashdot - designer babies so we can all have exactly the baby we dreamed of. I'm curious which hair colors/features will be most requested.
http://singularityhub.com/2009/02/25/designer-babies-like-it-or-not-here...
Early screening for diseases that intervention abrogates or at least prepares the parents for something that wasn't at all what they expected makes sense but this is just crazy.

Over the last two weekends I had the privilege of having a whole lotta Bowdoin Nordic in my life. I figured out if I waited long enough they would come to me and it worked – the carnival team had a good showing at the Dartmouth carnival last weekend and the Eastern Cup team raced well today, all at my favorite place to ski – Oak Hill. Good luck to everyone racing at Gunstock tomorrow and next weekend as the carnival circuit wraps up. You guys are making me jealous of this whole racing on skis thing – maybe some year my shoulder will stop complaining and I can join you again.  Coach Nate's blog is here.

On a slightly different note, I am managing to survive my first year of grad school and will be working in the Brain Imaging Lab up here. Classes are classes and I look forward to being able to concentrate on research after next year. It should also be easier because hopefully by then I will have wrapped the last couple things up for my Boston jobs. Stuff never seems to be quite done in science…

After a very long hiatus mtnhuck is back with some help from John. Hopefully Ill get some time to start posting again...

We took the ferry from Dutch Harbour to Homer, with biking stops along every fishing town the boat stopped in. After that we biked to Kenai along the coast and met up with Rachel's aunt who drove us down to Seward and a few of the glaciers.  Once  we got to Anchorage we ended up going to REI for one last shopping trip which ended up being about $550 between the two of us, before heading into the more remote sections of Alaska. We uploaded just over 500 pictures so enjoy!

I'm heading to Alaska this Friday, for about 6 weeks. I hope to be posting here once and a while but I wouldn't count on it as I probably won't be near a computer very often. Rachel and I are going to be taking a ferry from Dutch Harbour to Homer, then biking to Denali and over to Haines to grab another ferry and head down BC some. Pictures will be posted here or here.

in someone else's pool? Ohhh kids these days.

Subsidising any sort of agrarian activity goes against the main principles of how economies work. Items cost as much as people are willing to pay for them, which is related to how much people need the item and how much of the item is available. Currently corn prices near record highs but our government is still pouring money into the farms, paying them to produce corn. It makes no sense to subsidise corn, when there are several other crops that could be effectively grown that would be of higher demand. Large corporation get almost all of the money that we pay for corn, basically meaning that a portion of your tax dollars go to paying these large corporations to grow corn, which they would probably be doing anyways. These subsidies have invaded our lives, with high fructose corn syrup being put in everything because its cheaper(thanks to our tax dollars) than regular sugar, which tastes better. Don't even get me started on using corn for ethanol, potentially one of the worst ideas ever...

Being a good consumer like I am I just bought the latest Spoon CD, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and was very excited to listen to it as I already liked a few songs on it, particularly You Got Yr. Cheery Bomb and Underdog. I put the CD in my computer at work and pressed play. I waited expectantly for a few seconds and finally some choppy audio from the start of Don't Make Me A Target played. Then it went silent. Checked for scratches, nothing.  I thought it might be was the matlab running in the background, but it was only taking up 50% of my CPU. I then tried to import it to my computer. First with iTunes, which hung about 2/3s of the way through the first song. I then tried 4 other programs with no success. At this point I was getting pretty mad as I just paid money for this CD and I can't even import it into iTunes or listen to it on my computer. At John's suggestion I decided to try playing with Nero. I made a copy of the CD with Nero, which took forever, I think beceause Nero was having problems reading the CD. Finally it burned a copy after over an hour of reading the CD. This new CD plays in my computer and is importing to iTunes as I type this.

Everything Hits at Once by Spoon is one of my favorite songs. It has a great beat and more importants a theme that I can fully understand. When things go bad, they all go bad quickly. This morning is definitely an example of that. First my graphics card on my new PC died. Then upon arriving to work I found that our server had reset connections to several of the computers I was using to process the last bits of data I need to get before I submit my paper(before I leave of AK so basically 14 days or less). Then about 10 other small things in lab were either broken or needed me to do something. Please keep in mind that this is not complaining, I would call someone if I wanted to do that, this is simply exemplifying why I have had Everything Hits at Once playing almost all day at work. If you haven't heard it go to youtube and put it on. Sometimes I think days like today are a good reality check for me, as I am generally very laid back and am agnostic about how daily events turn out.