This man has a huge set of steel balls!

This is the end...my only friend...the end. -- Jim Morrison, the Doors

Jim Morrison was a seriously GREAT Poet.


The Hot Librarian has been asking me for months, maybe even years, to delete this blog and start a new one. I think she finds it embarrassing (or something like that) to have 7 years of our lives on the web available for public consumption. She and I have changed so much in the last 7 years that the old stories about getting drunk or whatever seem so irrelevant now. Statements like "Jim Morrison was a seriously great poet..." just don't have the same meaning as when I first wrote them and they might come back to haunt me some day. So I have agreed to comply and delete this blog. But don't worry fearless reader (Robbo) I am/have started a new blog. It is actually an old blog that I let fall by the wayside and I am (for now) reviving. It is called Left Whorled. You can find it here.

Arrgh

First of all, I spent the majority of my last three days at work trying to learn a new computer language for statistical analysis and mostly for population simulations. I figured it out! Its called Program R. Here is some sample Code:

sims <- 1000
aSia <- 62.47249
bSia <- 22.29344
aSii <- 52.53239
bSii <- 56.91009
Sia <- matrix( , sims, 1)
Sii <- matrix( , sims, 1)

for(i in 1:sims){
Sia[i] <- rbeta(1, aSia, bSia)
Sii[i] <- rbeta(1, aSii, bSii)
}

Yummy isn't it? This brief bit of code selects 1000 pseudo-random values of Adult and immature survival from beta distributions that are based on empirically derived means and variances. Heretofore I used Visual Basic for this sort of thing but R is a much more efficient code and a faster program. I am very pleased with my self.

Also yeah for the Boston Celtics! Though I like Gasol and Odom as players, I really dislike the Lakers.

Plus, after only two weeks, I have no idea how I managed to live my life with out Tivo.

Lastly, Silver Jews new album came out yesterday and I forgot to down load it last night. Whoops...I'll get right to it.

1358

An actual title of an article in the spring issue of the Wilson Journal of Ornithology:

"Specimen shrinkage in Cinnamon Teal"

UPDATE: I read the article...it is not a funny as it sounds.

Working man.

I am a working man now. I arrive at the office at about 8:20am I leave by about 4:30. I am busy pretty much all day long with work related things, like tracking down papers on Horseshoe crab population dynamics, or reading book chapters on objective functions and optimization techniques. I've also been working on a new paper about sampling variance and how it affects wildlife population models, and I've been having meetings about other research and writing opportunities, and getting safety trained in things like, how to drive and how to use the internets safely. I have determined that blogs may not be a safe use of the internet, namely I don't want my bosses to know about this blog so I don't want to be writing to it from work. Thus posting content and frequency suffers. You should probably go find something funny or interesting to read. Besides I declared months ago that May 2008 would be the end of Dis-traction, yet here I am posting still. What am I, Hillary Clinton? Ha! I kill me.

We're in Delaware...

I've been in Delaware for a week or so. Well, Delaware and New Jersey to be exact but it was southern, rural New Jersey, which minus the WaWa markets it was basically Delaware. I was there to trap birds and do some Horseshoe crab sampling. The Delaware Bay has the highest density of Horseshoe crabs of anywhere in the world, they come up the beach at high tide enmasse, the females dig nests and lay thier eggs by the millions. The shorebirds, migrating northward from South America to the Canadian Arctic, stop off enmasse in the Delaware bay for about 3 weeks every spring and gorge them selves on the Horseshoe crab eggs. It really is one of those wonders of nature that help me to love life. The is basically the system that I am studying and modeling for my post-doc research. Here is a picture that I took of spawning crabs at high tide on Monday morning.

Graduation

update

Graduation = successful

Moving to Maryland = successful

Unpacking our moving trucka and returning it on time = successful

Starting my new job = moderately successful

They can and will track my internet useage at work so that it is for now.

#1352

Exciting news items in bullet form:

- We sold our house. By that I mean we are under contract to sell our house and we close on May 23rd.

- I got my official offer letter from my new job last week and they offered my a few thousand more dollars per year than they originally verbally offered me...Whohoo!

- Today is mothers day and I made the whole family french toast...Eva insisted on calling it "freedom toast"...ok that was a joke she actually calls it "aggie bahdee"... translation: Eggie Bread.

- We depart Missouri for Maryland in 6 days.

- I finished revising and submitted my dissertation to the University on Friday.

- I have to take a drug test tomorrow to secure my employment...I hope that pot I smoked back in the winter of 2002 has worked its way out of my system.

- I have to get back to packing!

This Blog

Has become a series of post relating how busy I am. That is mostly because I am very busy...there is a lot going on. A house sale, moving to a new state, starting a new job, finishing a dissertation...the list goes on. But I am going to talk about politics today.

I am really pissed at Hillary Clinton. Just fucking give up already lady. You are not going to win unless you rely on some back room swindling...some sketchy tactics, the kind of things that Americans grew to hate about the Clintons back in the 1990s. So, please, just stop. You are not a better candidate. You are getting votes in the primaries simply because you are married to the guy that was president during a time of high economic growth and relative international security. Considering how the last 8 years have gone people are nostalgic for the 90's. If you were to successfully steal this nomination you will lose the general election because the Republicans will start parading around Monica Lewinski and Linda Trip. People will begin to remember the lies and cheating and the sinister politics of the late 90's...the reason Bush won the presidency in the first place. So just Stop this nonsense. Thanks.

# 1350

If you have not yet discerned, I passed my defense yesterday afternoon. It took 3.5 hours of challenges and questions to and about my research. But in the end, after 4 minutes of closed door "deliberations" my advisor shook my and said "Congratulation Dr. The Bird Man, you did an excellent job." Whew! I am sorry to the Celtics for using too much of their Mojo, But I needed it. Especially when after 3 hours and 15 minutes one committee member asked to to head to the black board to draw and discuss a logistic growth curve. I have decided to take all of Josh Howard's post season Mojo and send it to Boston in an attempt to rectify my mojo debt. He's not using it anyway.