Found a really nice and extremely usable site yesterday. And it's in Decatur, which is a nice place. And this morning I met with a very nice undergrad who is going to help me with field work as part of her senior project. Woohoo. I'm actually going to pull off this whole research thing.
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(7)
11:26:18 AM,
Monday 14 January 2002
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Remember how Antonin Scalia handed Bush the presidency? Well, Bush has now given Scalia's son a political appointment. Who here can say tit for tat?
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(1)
08:06:10 AM,
Sunday 13 January 2002
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Gosford Park is absolutely wonderful. Complex, funny, full of characters, and a good mystery story besides.
Remi rented Bob Roberts for me and we watched that yesterday, too. I don't know how I had missed seeing it before. Perfection. And a good reminder that "President" Bush is merely a continuation of the Contract on America politics of the early '90's. Which was a revamping of the greed of the '80's. Which themselves were just a continuation of the reactionary, hate-filled politics of the late '60's and early 70's.
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(11)
11:19:21 AM,
Saturday 12 January 2002
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Haven't read your Bacon, have you?
From New Organon (Urbach and Gibson translation) Aphorism 80, next to last paragraph:
"Some naively fear that a deeper inquiry into Nature would transgress the accepted limit of prudence, distorting what is said in the holy scriptures about the sacred mysteries against those who would pry into divine secrets, and applying them to the hidden things of Nature, which are forbidden by no interdict.
Others more cunningly surmise and reflect that if intermediate causes are unknown, everything can more readily be referred to the divine hand and wand, a matter, as they think, of great importance to religion; which is nothing other than "wishing to plase God through a lie."
Others fear from past examples that developments and changes in philosophy will end in attacks on religion.
Others, finally, seem anxious lest inquiry into Nature may discover something that would overthrow religion, or at least weaken it, especially among the uneducated. But these two latter fears seem to me to show an insubstantial kind of wisdom, as if men in their inmost hearts and secret thoughts distrusted and doubted the strength of religion and the sovereignty of faith over the sense, and therefore feared that they would be jeopardized by the search for truth in Nature. Whereas, if the matter is rightly considered, natural philosophy is, after the word of God, the surest antidote to superstition, and at the same time the most excellent nourishment for faith."
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(2)
07:45:23 AM,
Saturday 12 January 2002
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This weekend The Man Who Wasn't There, In the Bedroom, and Gosford Park are opening at local theaters and the campus theater is showing Mulholland Drive. It's art flick heaven!
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(1)
12:51:39 PM,
Wednesday 9 January 2002
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Hey all you Greer, SC fans: there's a pretty impressive stream restoration project at the Bi-Lo headquarters in Mauldin.
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(5)
11:31:33 AM,
Wednesday 9 January 2002
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The new imac pretty much is the coolest thing ever.
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(9)
03:05:43 PM,
Tuesday 8 January 2002
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"Love is not an emotion, it's a policy."
Madeleine L'Engle quotes somebody or other
Or, to put it in country music terms
"Love's not some thing we're in, it's something that we do."
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(10)
08:03:24 AM,
Tuesday 8 January 2002
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The EPA's Watershed Locator page is one of those few truly useful websites. You can enter anything from a town to a park to a peninsula and get not only the watershed it's in but topo maps (extremely useful) and aerial photographs (very neat).
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(3)
10:55:47 AM,
Monday 7 January 2002
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Another day.l Another semester.
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(3)
08:23:16 AM,
Monday 7 January 2002
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They Might Be Giants have been nominated for a Grammy for "You're Not the Boss of Me" (ie the Malcolm in the Middle song) (warning, PDF is 45 pp long)
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(2)
09:22:15 AM,
Saturday 5 January 2002
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This is pretty cool. I'm going to Rock Creek Greenway park, home of Jupiter, tomorrow. I can look at stream restoration and explore the solar system, all at once.
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(2)
11:41:57 AM,
Friday 4 January 2002
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It appears to be snowing.
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(5)
09:21:55 AM,
Wednesday 2 January 2002
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Remi and I went to Atlanta to look at a site today. It's okay, but not ideal, fairly small, major kudzu problem. So I was a little discouraged. We had heard that The Royal Tenenbaums was not playing in Athens, so we talked about maybe seeing it in Atlanta. But I was confused about where "The Mall of Georgia" was and we didn't know anywhere else to go, so we came back to Athens sort of dejected. And // The Royal Tenenbaums was playing at Beechwood. We had an hour to kill so we went to Border's. And, of all things, Remi found there an English import of Michelle Shocked's 1988 Short Sharp Shocked, which I have been in pursuit of for years. And it was 50% off. And it rules. And then we saw the movie and it was crazy and good. I am delighted to learn that Luke Wilson looks just like Owen. yummy.
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08:15:41 PM,
Tuesday 1 January 2002
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I would really like it if somebody could convince me that The Contender is not an extremely accurate portrayal of the American political system and attitudes towards women. Please, convince me that that is not exactly what would happen.
I was surprised by what a good movie it is, but also by my own visceral reaction.
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08:08:40 AM,
Tuesday 1 January 2002
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There are only 2 people in the entire Institute. Apparently, the university is closed. Luckily, I have keys.
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11:31:25 AM,
Monday 31 December 2002
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One more on the list of things my mom was right about:
If you clean the house before you go out of town, coming home is much more pleasant.
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06:18:33 PM,
Sunday 30 December 2001
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For anybody who might be interested, may I present my hydrology class project.
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(4)
06:07:46 PM,
Sunday 30 December 2001
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In addition to socks with toes and multiple books and sweaters, I got Moulin Rouge on DVD. We have only watched it all the way through once (that was my 5th viewing) but we have been enjoying cut scenes, music videos, trailers, 3 different commentaries, and interviews with Baz.
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(4)
05:09:34 PM,
Thursday 27 December 2001
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Good Christmas. My socks have toes.
Oh, and I am twenty-five. My brother gave me a 2 year old's birthday card and a 5 year old's birthday card with a note about multiplication and addition. He's a little weird.
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(8)
10:44:56 PM,
Tuesday 25 December 2001
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It's probably a sad statement on my life that Mission Valley Theater still feels a lot like home.
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04:52:14 PM,
Sunday 23 December 2001
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I simply enjoy wrapping presents.
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(1)
12:09:48 PM,
Friday 21 December 2001
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And now I'm in a different state from the Science Library. Life is good.
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10:46:47 PM,
Thursday 20 December 2001
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So the sites are mostly a bust. Luckily I found this out before I went traipsing through downtown Atlanta in the Eco-Minivan. Back to online research and email begging I go. Time to try to get somebody at the Army Corps to return my phone calls.
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(4)
09:44:55 AM,
Tuesday 18 December 2001
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Seen in downtown Athens:
The newest trend in SUV stylin:
The Isuzu Axiom.
I couldn't make that up if I tried.
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(8)
07:54:35 PM,
Sunday 16 December 2001
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I've been working on my annual holiday reading of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising books. The book The Dark is Rising is the finest Midwinter's Eve through Twelfth Night book ever. And, really, I would say this is my favorite fantasy series. I definitely love The Chronicles of Narnia, and I'm growing to love His Dark Materials and Harry Potter, too. But something about the good old Old Ones stomping around through Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, and Wales and completing their wonderful quests and stopping the Dark just does it for me.
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(9)
07:53:47 AM,
Sunday 16 December 2001
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What's tact and why don't you have any?
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(1)
08:35:56 AM,
Saturday 15 December 2001
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Remi rented me the Indigo Girls' video Watershed. It's a combination of all of their videos up to around 1994, bits of interviews, bits of home videos, tapes of very old shows from this area, etc. It made me very happy.
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08:16:53 AM,
Saturday 15 December 2001
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I have to find sites for my research before the next semester starts. I was thinking that meant before Christmas, but I recently found out two things.
1)The semester doesn't start until Jan 7th.
2)The Science Library will be closed Dec 20-Jan 2
This means that even if I were here immediately after Christmas, I could get very little done in terms of reading. It also means that I have a week more of break than I thought. I keep forgetting that this isn't SJC and there's no connectivity between semesters and I really don't have that much to do over break. Except find sites. So I'll do what I can, but I really want to get out of this place for awhile.
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(2)
08:38:02 AM,
Friday 14 December 2001
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Good lecture by Bernie Patten, one of the great systems ecologists here. He was talking about using systems theory to understand evolution. He had a couple of main points, which I think may interest those interested in the theory of evolution.
First, consider that biological evolution is a continuation of chemical evolution, which in turn was a continuation of the evolution of elementary particles.
elementary particles-->periodic table-->giraffes
Nobody thinks of "natural selection" when talking of the elementary particles forming chemicals.
Second, remember that each generation of a species affects its surroundings, so that it passes along to the succeeding generation an "envirotype" as well as a genotype.
His proposal is that the combination of genotype, phenotype, and envirotype producing the changes of evolution (as well as recent recognition among molecular scientists that Lamarcke was right to some extent) gives us evolution dependent on the first principles of physics, describing that mechanism previously referred to as "natural selection" in a way that does not have the telos of fitness.
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(3)
11:58:05 AM,
Thursday 13 December 2001
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Today is the anniversary of the usurping of democracy.
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(12)
10:18:13 AM,
Wednesday 12 December 2001
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I spent the first 13 years of my life under the Cold War and the past twelve under whatever this is. It seems to me that the ABM took a whole lot of work to achieve, was incredibly important to at least making us feel safe, and created some measure of trust between the US and the USSR. To throw it aside because it's inconvenient to Bush's plans to get elected seems, as with every other decision made by this administration, preposterously short-sighted.
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(2)
07:37:19 AM,
Wednesday 12 December 2001
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I saw a great Georgia seen the other day on a walk. There was a gigantic, annoyed crow, and, as gigantic, annoyed crows do, he was jumping around at the top of a tree. The tree happened to be a pecan tree and with every jump a shower of pecans would fall and crack on the sidewalk. If the crow had only been a little brighter, he would have realized what he was doing and he could have had pecans.
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(8)
09:30:31 AM,
Tuesday 11 December 2001
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If we do not restore all of our urban streams, the terrorists have already won.
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(5)
10:08:42 PM,
Monday 10 December 2001
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Today is my first rainy day in Athens.
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12:18:59 PM,
Monday 10 December 2001
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To add to the ever growing list:
According to this man in Anaheim, if the city police accept Mexico-issued ID's as official ID's, the terrorists have already won.
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(5)
08:06:39 AM,
Monday 10 December 2001
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