Gorgeous Picture

You can only see part of the picture here.  If you want more, go to Nasa.  I use a Nasa site, http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html, for my homepage because it provides something interesting every day. I love today’s picture of NGC 6302, the Big Bright Bug Nebula.

Thinking about moving

Today makes 8 years married for me and Gina. They’ve gone by amazingly quickly. They’ve been wonderful. And we have been incredibly blessed. I really want to figure out ways to repay the blessings that we have received. Our debt, particularly my debt, is incredible.

I was in Los Alamos today, and Gina had me look at a home that we could possibly rent up there. I got to the neighborhood and started laughing inside and thinking “Oh, great. I’m wasting my time and the realtor’s time. Oh well, it will be fun to see what such a nice home is like inside.” And the whole time I looked through it I kept on laughing inside, trying not to show the fact that I felt that the price they were asking was ridiculously low for what they were offering. The home is off of a quiet alpine road on a circle that also has 3 other homes. They all are in a lot of shade because of tall pines all around. Inside the home it opens up into a high ceiling and a beautiful staircase. Behind a partial wall is an ample kitchen space to eat on the tile. A sliding door opens up to a large brick patio and walkways go either way off of the patio to different portions of the yard. The owners had a good sized garden on the portion to the left as you face the back yard.

I actually can’t describe everything too well because I was too amused and bedazzled to pay proper attention to the layout. There are 5 bedrooms and two bathrooms. There is an ample garage with a good workbench and plenty of space for a couple of cars. The main room has plenty of space for the ping pong table.

 

The owners have the home on the market for 400k. But they aren’t really sure they want to sell. They are in Australia for 3 years with a leave of absence from the lab. (I don’t know why they are gone for 3 years . . .) Anyway, I figured that the fact that we have 5 young kids would kill the deal for them. But he talked with them and they would be happy to take the home off the market if we would sign a contract for 1250 a month for a year.

That’s more than we have wanted to pay. We’ve found that you can live in a getto-ish place in Los Alamos for about $800 and a startup-type home in White Rock for $1000-1100. The ones in White Rock are 3 bedrooms plus a 1 car garage. But they have decent back yards and an amazing lack of crime. They are a bit old and crummy-looking, a lot of them, but kind of cute too. They are about 1100 sq. ft. We have been planning on living in one of them but they all get plucked off the market before we can bite.

So, should we do it? Here are some serious reasons not to do it:

• They want a year contract but I only have guaranteed funding in LANL through October.

• We live right now it the cheapest home we will probably ever buy again. Right now our payments are less $700 per month and $100 of that goes to paying off the mortgage.

• It’s 250 more than we might be able to pay for a reasonable place in White Rock.

• It’s not within walking distance from the church—actually, come to think of it, it might be if you walk through the canyon.

• Bigger homes cost more to maintain and it is about 2500 square feet.

Here are some smaller reasons why not:

• The commute: it takes 5 minutes to drive from the home to the Lab and another 4 minutes or so within the lab to get to where I will work. That is driving so biking like I want will be tough.

• It seems too good for us. What if we get spoiled?

Here are reasons we might want to do it:

• Good neighbors

• Great schools

• Beautiful area

• Beautiful home

• We could use more room than we have right now or than those homes in White Rock have: 3 bedrooms is starting to seem small for 7 people, especially when one of the 3 rooms is have taken up by food storage.

• I’ll be working full time this summer. If we stay here that means being gone from home 13.5 hours per day, 5 days per week. With a new baby that seems like a lot to ask of Gina.

• One hidden cost of our current home is the value of the equity. Interest on the equity would be worth at least $200 or so per month.
• Maybe this is a gift from above. One might want to avoid refusing gifts like that.

What do you think? Should we go for it?

Oh. When I walked out to the car there were two woman talking, the one on her deck and the other on her driveway. Both were (don’t tell them my estimate) at least 7 months along. That is at least two out of the four households on the circle expecting children.

Update 4/28/07: They decided to accept 1200 a month and to let us out of the lease if we need out as long as we can find someone to replace us.  We are going forward and as long as nothing falls through we will be living in this home as of the beginning of June.

Lily at 1 month

I can’t believe it but she’s already 1 month old. She’s changed a lot. And I just learned how to host photos on Flickr but link them here. So here you go.

You can see that she has a beautiful retina. Like a cat, that Lily. Here is the same picture with the red removed using Gimp:

Pretty cool, this Gimp stuff is.  (Note: I don’t know what I’m doing with it.  I just opened the jpg in Gimp and covered the red spots with black.  At first I covered the white spots and it looked wrong so I got them back and it looks good if you don’t look close enough to see the jagged line between the gray iris and the black I added to cover the red.  Altogether it is funny: the doctored photo is in one way fake but at the same time it gives a much closer resemblance to the actual Lily.)

Anyway, Happy one month, Lily!

A sad day, but there’s hope (pictures)

Kokamoona has gradually been dissappearing from our home for the last 4 years.  It’s been like losing a daughter.  But that hasn’t prepared us for the tragedies that have been occuring more recently.  First Jon died of an accident on a diving board.  He is one of Timmy’s three brothers, and flies airplanes even though he is three.  Now Bainy and Chechy seem to have died as well (it sounds like an accident involving a back dive off of the diving board).  Timmy says that they can be with us always now.  I guess it is a bit like Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Anyway, I think he’s taken a lot of comfort in knowing that he has three brothers/friends and it’s sad to see them go.  I don’t know what has happened to Jon’s little brother, I-want-a-mustache, though.  I hope he’s still around.

Anyway,  as the friends of the older kids leave, I think we can still have hope that some people will join the younger girls.  Today, for example, Elsie was talking on the phone (actually Kate’s calculator).  Who was she talking to?  And a couple of days ago I saw a pretty friend swinging next to Lily.

One key to a simple life: lock certain doors

This morning for scripture study I went modern, reading from Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball. This paragraph struck me as extremely useful:

“It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the devil to enter a door that is closed. He seems to have no keys for locked doors. But if a door is slightly ajar, he gets his toe in, and soon this is followed by his foot, then by his leg and his body and his head, and finally he is in all the way.(pp. 106-107)”

I think that proper application of this principle can save a whole lot of psychological hassle and spiritual pain.

justfree.com: Free MySQL, PHP hosting

I’ve been wanting to learn about database backed web stuff. One barrier for me has been the fact that I’m pretty hesitant to spend money and being hosted costs money if you want options. So I’m pretty excited to have found justfree.com. I haven’t tried it yet but I’ll let you know as I do.

A thousand birds sing

Imagine a benign creator who makes a thousand birds with the most beautiful voices. Two thirds of them sing just for the pure joy of it and their creator provides for their every need. Others bicker about what to sing. Still others worry enough about making sure that they have enough food that they don’t take time to sing. Others spend their time trying to figure out what they should do with this short life of theirs. They grow old and die, having put off their singing because they weren’t sure it was what they needed to do. Some of the birds listened to the singers and realize that they can never make music so beautiful and become song critics.

Life and education in a changed land

Today we finished up with one of Abby’s experiments. She wanted to see if a marble would dissolve in water if you put shreds of paper in with the marble and the water as well. I couldn’t remember how to dissolve glass but I knew you could do it. I asked Gina how long she thought it would take to find a chemical that dissolves glass using the internet. I don’t know what she said, but I guessed that it would take less than 30 seconds. Sure enough, all I had to do was type “dissolve glass” in Google and I was referred to a Wikipedia article on HF, which will dissolve it no problem. (By the way, that stuff is nasty. It’s not that strong an acid but it will go right through your skin and start attacking calcium in your blood and then altering your bones. A little will cause a great deal of pain. More will kill you. We decided not to teach Abby how to dissolve glass for at least a few years.)

To me the fact that this obscure information was so immediately accessible is amazing. It means that the world has changed forever. I’m trying to put my finger on the meaning of the change and I’m not sure exactly what it is. Let me try this: information is becoming almost instantly accessible. That means that you can learn to do just about anything if you are able to follow instructions. Because we have more information than any person could ever learn and because it is accessible in seconds, the critical skills are becoming those that help us to find information, to discriminate good quality information from bad quality information, and to understand the information that we find. It’s funny, but what I’m starting to think is that a classical education is becoming more valuable than ever as things change.

BTW, today was very productive with progress in all three areas.

Only three hours . . .

Today I woke up excited to get to work. I had a list of three separate tasks that I wanted to complete. By the end of the day I had read a lot of fascinating articles on the internet and completed only one of the three tasks. I would say that if you include the entire day I only got in about 3 hours of good work.

For Los Alamos I’ve been working on a fun little project. I’ve been running different simulations to see what happens in different scenarios when lasers and atoms interact. The simulations are similar to each other, but different in enough ways that to transition from one simulation to another takes a little time and can introduce errors into the calculations. So this time when the physical chemist I work for (I work for two people at Los Alamos, Howard Barnum, a quantum theorist, and Michael Di Rosa, a physical chemist. I fall somewhere in between their two specialties. Sometimes our meetings are entertaining. Sometimes when the one gets interested the other tunes out and vice versa. Both are good men and it’s a pleasure to work with them.) asked me to do a couple of different simulations, I thought it would be fun to step back and attack the problem a bit more generally. So I’m writing a program in Python that generates the code that runs on MatLab. I’m now to the point where the Python program will write good MatLab simulations for the types of situations that it is meant to handle. Now I have to smooth things out, take care of physical quantities, document, look for semantic bugs, get the Python program to produce meaningful MatLab comments, and so on. That was my 3 hours of successful hard work. I get to show off the program on Wednesday.

There are two projects that I would like to move forward on but that I didn’t move forward on today. One is to just lay down some basics for my understanding of quantum computing. That domain has exploded over the last 12 or so years. I find that to communicate with the experts I can’t be trying to rebuild the 12 years of progress in my mind while they talk—I have to have it on hand. So there is a lot of work to do to enter that discipline and community. The other is a paper that I’ve been working on. I finished writing down a good chunk of the physical content of the paper and now I’m at the point where I need to add references, make figures, clean up the text, and so on. It isn’t as fun or romantic as the earlier part.

Tomorrow is a new day and I hope that I can report that I have done better in each of those areas than I have done today.

What did I do during all that other time? I read the story of the founding of Adobe during an hour or so of it and held Lily for a good chunk of that time. I read a neat essay by Roger Hamming (of Bell Labs, the originator of coding theory and namesake of the hamming window) on how to perform great research over time. I read a nice essay on network effects and how they can make questions like “which novel will become the new Harry Potter” mathematically impossible to answer even when you have complete intrinsic quality information. I read email, I made lunch, and so on. I actually did do a bit of quantum computation as well.

I guess that in the end I took the fact that I’m only being paid to work part time very literally. If I work 8 hours one day a week when I actually go up to Los Alamos, then if I get in 3 hours of high quality time each day on the rest of the days I can be sure of working my contracted 20 hours each week.

Still, I’m not proud of my performance today. I’m painfully ashamed.

This blog

Who are you, reading this? I believe that you are almost exclusively my family and friends. That has been true from the beginning. And that makes this whole endeavor interesting.

I’ve been thinking a bit about what I want to do with blogging. Do I want to provide a service? I could make the blog about some specific area of interest. Do I want to document the progress of a set of goals? I could keep things specific to one area of my life. After a year of blogging I think I am starting to come to know what I want from blogging. I think that I want to be me.

It is one thing to be loved. It is another to be known and to be loved. I guess I am writing with some hope that if I if I let you know me there will be some chance that you will still love me. And that would be kind of neat.

This post is a warning. In the past I have written maybe once a week. And a lot of it has been pretty impersonal. I will be writing a bit more often and the topics will be all over the board. You may want to cancel your RSS feed now or risk having it bug you regularly for a little while.

Consider yourself warned.