Via David Strom’s blog, I found this photo essay of labs at night. One of my favorite moments is walking into a dark lab, or closing up at the end of a long night… When I switch off the room’s lights and turn-around to close and lock the door, the shining LEDs of every color, flashing as packets flow, sometimes temporarily blinding me (Juniper’s blue LEDs on M-series anyone?), are always beautiful enough to surprise me and make me feel like there is still some mystery and magic in the technology I work with.
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Labs at Night Photo-essay by Seed Magazine
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008Establishing Ecological Baselines With Paleoecology
Thursday, July 17th, 2008Today I’m in Chattanooga, TN, at the Society for Conservation Biology annual meeting, where my wife Emily Coffey is giving a talk on her research in establishing ecological baselines using paleoecological analysis.
Excitingly, Nature News just published a brief article on her work! I want to point out, when the article says “Coffey and her collaborators trekked to the misty highlands of Santa Cruz”, that I’m one of those collaborators! The words trek and misty make it sound magical… which it is, of course. But let me tell you, it’s also terribly slow, painful, wet, and painful again. (As a result of my “trek” I’ve mentally categorized bracken as a “hell-fern”.)
Anyways, I’m proud of her work and happy to have been a small part of it.
My home’s power usage
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008Recently I attached a multimeter to my home’s main electrical feed with a current clamp, and let it log around 24 hours of data. It’s summer and it’s hot, so I have several air-conditioners running (window units; I have an old home). There are my servers (running Linux), as well. And in the evening of course we turn on lights, cook food, watch movies, etc. Given all of this I didn’t really know what to expect. But I thought it would be a lot more variable than this:
This is one of the first times that I’ve used the logging feature on my meter, and there are some anomalies in the data. So I’m going to have to play with it a bit before I’m confident. But in the meantime, I’m just not sure what to take away from this data. I guess I’ll just keep on measuring…
Our home, as seen from afar
Monday, June 9th, 2008
ice age. literally.
Thursday, March 20th, 2008From the BBC, by way of Greenpeace, I stumbled across this scary graphic:
Just looking at the graph, that’s about a 50% growth in the proportion of young ice versus older ice. The graphic doesn’t portray absolute figures, just percentages. But since we know the ice cover is shrinking overall this means that older ice is disappearing faster than young ice or that young ice is “replacing” old ice, or something like that. Whichever way the actual values point, it’s a bad sign.
