I've never been good when my plans are changed for me.   As a kid, this sort of disruption made me very upset.   I was a stubborn child ( Read more... )

I'm roughly 50% deaf in both ears, from at least early childhood. It is a peculiar sort of deafness which knocks out my ability to hear midrange frequencies, normally associated with consonants in spoken English, while leaving me sensitive to higher and lower frequency sounds.   I get the missing ~50% of my 'hearing' from lip-reading.   Nobody else ( Read more... )

A good friend's boss is dying this weekend from an aggressive malignant melanoma. He has a wife and two young children. He runs a research lab, studying how to cure brain cancer (and has been doing so). He's 35 ( Read more... )

I've hung out with the crush girl a couple of times after I made dinner for her. I've gotten to know her better somewhat. She's got a PhD and cures brain cancer, with a solid background in all the biology that implies (previously known to me). She is a strong follower of football, the Iowa Hawkeyes in particular. She is also active in her ( Read more... )

So, having a first date tonight. I'm cooking dinner for the girl, but I'm still figuring out what exactly to make. The current idea is chicken and fennel sautéed with tomatoes and homemade tapioca for desert. I was thinking of anise flavored tapioca, but that might be too much with the fennel ( Read more... )

How would one be likely to respond to the following scenario: You realize someone you've known for years as a friend has a crush on you.
Part of what lets me get along with others as well as I do is that I spend a lot of time observing and thinking about how people react to things in their life. A corollary of this is that I spend time thinking ( Read more... )

I just found my login info after a few years of not having a clue how to do so. I wonder if this part of the web is still alive.

I've got an algorithm to analyze DNA sequences for repetitive patterns. Unfortunately, this is an O(n^n) algorithm.

A test run on a very small dataset took a minute. The test dataset was 1000 bp. The full dataset is 14,283,897 bp and will take roughly 6.4 years.

I think I need to sort out a better way of doing this.

For a while now I've had an interest in lesser/underutilized crop plants. Over the last few years I've been putting together a document outlining the various tuber/bulb/root crops I can find information on. The list has grown to 78 species/genera.

I expect it will grow longer as I add information about seed/etc crops.

I got a new cactus: Tephrocactus articulatus

Though as with most succulents for sale, the species identification is questionable.