It seems that all four of the most regular contributors to this site have moved recently. After getting hired on permanently, I moved back in with my parents over the summer. I finally sold my house on the last day in July, but took a pretty brutal beating financially. That forced me to continue to rent in Myrtle Beach until I can afford to buy a new house.

The place I chose is a guest house, quite small compared with what I’m used to. It is about halfway between the school and the beach, and is right on the Intracoastal Waterway. A major advantage is that all utilities are included, and I can rent month-to-month. So as soon as I’m able to buy, I can move out immediately.

As you probably know, Hurricane Hanna is headed straight for the Georgia/South Carolina coast. I’ve only technically ever been through one hurricane. In 1989, Hugo hit the South Carolina coast and was still a hurricane when it hit our house 200 miles inland. Based on where my house is, I’ll be the first that will be forced to evacuate. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get a renter’s insurance policy.

Congrats to the men’s football team, who won their season opener against James Madison yesterday. Perhaps it was because they stole Clemson’s mojo: the players all rubbed a rock from the “Duke stone” quarry as they entered the stadium. Or perhaps it was because UNC decided to be neighborly: parachutists accidentally delivered the game ball from the UNC opener to Wallace Wade.

The idea of comparing the cost of the war in Iraq with the money spent on science research in the United States has crossed my mind a few times in recent months, so I finally looked it up. Brace yourselves. The US is spending the equivalent of the annual National Science Foundation budget every two weeks fighting the war in Iraq (about 6 billion dollars). In total, the war has cost us the equivalent of 100 years of NSF funding.

The NIH budget is substantially higher than the NSF budget. It takes two months of Iraq war to spend the annual NIH budget.

The war cost referenced here is just the upfront cost of counting the war. It does not count the backend costs of retooling the military, taking care of our wounded and killed soldiers, and the negative impact on our economy.  Sources estimate these costs double the true cost of the war.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk — my tv and computer broke last month, we don’t have cable/internet in our temporary apartment, and I’ve been swamped with work — but I simply cannot resist posting this video:

[Today's Big Thing]

One of the things I always liked about our work with force chains was how much they seemed like lightning. Even in slow motion that seems to be the case. Compare, for instance, with the distribution of force during a simulated meteor impact:

A couple of quick-shots as you watch your favorite baseball team fall further and further from contention. (So this is what it feels like, Joe?)

• Today’s post at the Duke Chronicle’s sports blog asks the age old sabermetric question: should you go for it on fourth down?

• The pre-season coaches’ poll is out, and for the first time, Steve Spurrier did not vote for Duke. Allegedly, it’s because he was asked not to do so in order to protect the almighty integrity of the poll. I’ll pause and wait for you to stop laughing.
• The Cutcliffe era started yesterday.

It’s a brave new world. In the latest update to the iPhone, the ability was given to third parties to develop their own applications for the device. There are several killer apps, like I mentioned in the comments of the Pandora blog entry. Now: writing WordPress posts mobily. Hi from SC state road 8, aka Easley Highway!

In th early 20th century J.M. Burgers’ attempted to model fluid flow by adding a nonlinear term to the linear diffusion equation. The idea never panned out for modeling fluids, but the nonlinear diffusion equation, now known as Burgers’ Equation has been studied quite a bit nonetheless. More recently (1988, 1992, and 2002) a form of the Burgers’ Equation was derived for the twist dynamics of twisted scroll waves. Scroll waves are the 3D analog to spiral waves (think of a scrolled up piece of paper). Scrolls are found in many types of excitable media and a number of experts believe they play a role in cardiac arrhythmia.

Until this week there had not been good experimental evidence published for scroll wave twist behaving according to Burgers’ Equation. But now you can read all about in in Europhysics Letters, “Evidence for Burgers’ equation describing the untwisting of scroll rings” (volume 83, article number 30010).

Oh, and I’m still waiting to hear about Entropy Maximization from one of my esteemed colleagues in blogging. And is each of us publishing in a journal on the other ones current continent of residence something Alanis Morisette would call “ironic”?

Brian's "Summer of George"

After my first year (read: two semesters) of living in the real world, I still hadn’t sold the house I’d lived in while in grad school. So, to save money on rent, I moved back in with my parents for June and July. My biggest fear going into this arrangement, other than a loss of a great deal of privacy and independence, was the prospect of being unconscionably bored.

So far, it seems I needn’t have worried. Within two days, my father came down with what he estimates to be his fifteenth or sixteenth kidney stone. Less than a week later, a young woman driving an SUV rammed into my family’s office building. Shortly after, I came down with my first kidney stone. (Oddly, and forebodingly, my dad’s first was when he was twenty-nine.)

I’ve also been helping out with the family business, making bi-weekly trips to the county courthouse, driving by potential investment properties, and hours and hours of computer research. And let’s not forget what I actually get paid for: I’ve written most of the labs for my fall semester classes.

During all this time, I’ve had the exquisite headache of aggressively trying to sell my house in one of the worst markets real estate has ever seen. Finally, today, a contract was put in on my house. It’s not very favorable to me, requiring even more financial difficulty, and it’s not very favorable to the buyer either, as I wouldn’t accept the terms of the contract if the situation were reversed, so I still feel it’s tenuous. But it’s progress.

And at least I’m not bored.

*My grandfather called me—actually, everyone he ever knew—”George”. This is probably because his name was Herman, which he shared with his favorite baseball player: George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

Every so often I make up a mix CD of my favorite songs at the moment; mostly new songs, but with some old songs sprinkled in for flavor. I thought it’d be a neat feature of this new blog to go through, song-by-song, and explain a little about why it appeals to me.

Chris Thile may very well be my favorite individual musician. Hand-picked from a young age to be a phenom on the mandolin, he was hooked up with friend Sean Watkins and his sister Sara to form the bluegrass group Nickel Creek. But as a solo artist, even at a young age, he was (perhaps unwittingly) tapped to be the savior of the genre. However, as he grew into his music, many were disappointed with his choice to stray from the fundamental roots of bluegrass.

His (and others’, admittedly) creation was called “newgrass“. Heavy doses of rock and even hip-hop are blended with mandolin and banjo melodies. I don’t know if this digression and the perceived disappointment in him professionally phased him, but in a recent interview he’s stated that he’s over it. Regardless, this new fusion of my favorite genres is one of the more exciting things that I think has happened in recent music.

A particular subset of this fusion is the covering of songs from other genres in a bluegrass style. This one, The White Stripes‘ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”, is a great example, and is particularly apt given Jack White’s interest in bluegrass. However, I think that my favorite is The Gourds‘ cover of “Gin and Juice” by Snoop Doggy Dogg. I’ll see if I can find it somewhere and include it on a future CD.

Next time: another cover, this time Brit-on-Brit

For those of you who have always wondered, “How do they make 3D measurements in a chemical system?”, your questions have finally been answered in detail. When the previous postdoc left the group he put together a nice example for us and my boss has decided this was clean enough to share with the world.

The technique is generic to any system where you can take transmission images at many angles around the system. You can read about it detail at the Steinbock group website. There is also a matlab example there (complete with sample data, it does require the function IRADON from the image processing toolbox).  Or you can just look at the pretty pictures.