Category: Uncategorized

Slacking: Successful

Okay, so I still haven’t renewed my ffxi account, but that hasn’t slowed me down on the slackitude front. I spent today getting snippets of reading in on biodiesel between updating livejournal, checking my email, and getting my ass handed to me in caylus.

I finally had a break through in Caylus, I came in second, instead of “half the score of the next to last guy”. I think it was 88-90-110 or something like that. My “strategy” was to save up building materials, and then blitz the castle construction. I did it wrong for the dungeon phase. I turned a cloth in for a favor, when if I’d used that placed token to acquire a food, I could have built twice, getting the favor for building that round, and getting the favor for having built two units in the dungeon. Instead, the guy who built after me got both of those favors. I think he ended up coming in last anyway. Ah well.

Now to impress upon myself the value of gold in the end game.

Leaving that aside, I’ve learned some valuable and interesting info on biodiesel feedstocks.

First, on the agricultural end. Some mustards and rapeseeds are not edible, but they aren’t edible to bugs either. They’d make great biodiesel and save on pesticides. Yay. We haven’t grown them as much, but it shouldn’t be a big deal to kick that one in to gear.

Secondly, the algae plan that MIT is looking into for smokestack cleaning is essentially the same plan the DoE investigated for 20 years and found unprofitable as a biodiesel cultivation method. It would probably work just fine to capture many of the toxic emissions from coal plants, and yield some biodiesel as a pleasant side effect.

However, this presents an interesting point. If you burn the biodiesel, then you’re no longer sequestering the smokestack carbon. If you don’t, then you really can’t count the biodiesel as a useful side benefit. Sure, sure, some of the carbon would go into other structural elements of the algae. And you could feed it to animals, turn it into ethanol, whatever. But all of those are going to release that carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide sooner or later. And since it came from under the ground, not from the atmosphere, that technically makes it an efficiency-increasing technique, not a renewable technology. Of course, if it was wood, or some other biomass (like the leftover lignin from cellulosic ethanol) you were burning instead of coal, it would be renewable. Any questions? (Heh).

The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has a new unicorn they’re chasing: High fat saprophytes, chubby molds and fungi. The main things this takes out of the original plan is the need for photosynthesis. These guys can do their business on wood, lawn clippings, whatever, in a nice dark tank. There’s no need for acres and acres of special algae ponds, because these little guys don’t take the sun’s energy directly, they get it second hand (like vegans). There’s no worries about your engineered oil-makers having to deal with natural competitors, because you control the tank. There’s alot of appeal to this plan, but this one doesn’t have the refinements or results of 20 years of research to back it up. We’ll see how that one goes. But it sounds cool to me.

Birthday: climbing / lymphoma fundraiser

Coincidentally, a friend of mine’s sister is holding a climb-for-lymphoma thing on my birthday, April 15th. I’ve done the athletic-activity-for-medical-condition gig before, and I generally enjoy it. I like spending time with socially conscious people and I like doing athletic things. Even if I think linking the two like that is absurd.

But anyway, anyone want to join me?

And who’s throwing my surprise birthday party, anyway? I need to get you an invite list. =)

goals, productivity, stress response, and bad habits

“I’m ambitious, but not motivated,” has been running through my head alot of late. It encapsulates something very true about my personality, though I think “motivated” may not be quite what I’m looking for.

So, this morning, I tried to log on to final fantasy xi, only to find out my account had been suspended for lack of a current credit card. The one I’ve been paying with expired in March. I have the replacement card, and I nearly pulled it out and got started again. But I paused to consider how good an idea that is.

I don’t buy that video games are my problem, any more than I buy that they cause teen violence. I definitely feel that I sorely misallocate my time, with video games taking up more time than they should. I’ve never been a nose to the grindstone student. In high school, my video gaming privileges were yanked a couple times, but it didn’t change my tendency to stay up late and not be ready to go on time in the morning. Entertainment reading took up most of the slack. Though I had many hours of laying in bed staring at the ceiling doing nothing but thinking and being miserable.

Instead I usually attribute it to having no good work habits. Which is pretty true. I don’t think I’ve finished a paper more than a day in advance in my life. I’d guestimate that I turned in 1/3 of all the papers I’ve done outside of class after the due date. But I think there’s something more.

When I was at CMU, I occasionally signed up for psych experiments. It was easy money (though not much) and I helped advance science. Pretty rockstar in my opinion. One of these experiments revealed a bit about how I work in my head. When I came in the experimenter went through the methodoly as per usual. Part of the story on this one was that we’d be getting electric shocks. Nothing dangerous she assured me, though it might hurt a bit. I shrugged and said I was fine with it. She repeated the point, and I told a story about when my family was moving from the middle of nowhere to the outskirts of nowhere. I was reaching behind some appliance (the microwave, I think) only to discover that mice, or something had gnawed through the cord. So, I got a pretty good voltage jolt. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t all that horrible either, I assure her. I’d be fine, maybe it was what got me into Electrical Engineering in the first place.

She had to go prep for the experiment, and left the waiting room. I sat down and started fiddling with some little brain puzzle. The next thing I know, she comes back into the room and thanks me. Then she explains that the experiment didn’t really involve shock at all. The experiment was all about how people reacted to anticipated unpleasant situations. I asked how I’d reacted, and she replied that I’d sat down and played with the brain game for 15 minutes (one way mirrors, gotta love ’em). She thought that my prior high voltage experience might be some sort of disqualifying factor. But I think I actually participated flawlessly. My usual reaction when faced with some sort of stressful situation is to dismiss it as non-stressful, and completely manageable, then distract myself with some sort of brain puzzle.

Great stress response for a student, right? Wrong. It’s only great if you can channel it productively. Since I typically direct my nervous analysis towards games or other recreational analysis and away from things I get graded on, it’s a terrible habit. It’s not my only stress aversion response, but it is one of the more annoying ones. Another big one is cruising on gay chat media. I used the excuse that it’s a way to meet people in the town I’ll soon be living in. And it is, but it’s a very time consuming way, and it has other problems to boot.

So, the real answer is “just do it”. Fuck gay.com, fuck ffxi, fuck excuses and other activities. Just do the work.

I’m still not reactivating ffxi. At least, not today. Maybe later this month, we’ll see how things go.