Merry Christmas!

Posted by on . 8 comments.

Euphorbia aphylla makes an excellent Christmas tree

This year I’m celebrating Christmas with my roommates, who have become part of my chosen family.  I’ve mentioned before that I really love Christmas, but it’s probably hard to understand how much I love Christmas until you’ve lived with me in December and had to deal with the nonstop Christmas music and continuously flour covered kitchen.  My roommates do a good job of not strangling me.

While giving presents is one of my favorite parts of Christmas, I’m not as excited about getting them now as I was when I was a kid.  This year, however, I got a fantastic, fantastic present that I can’t help being incredibly excited about:  I found out that one of my grants is funded!  Since my lab didn’t get the grant that was supposed to fund half my wages for the next 6 months, this is a huge relief.  Plus, getting a grant is very good for my ego.

If you have to spend Christmas with people that make you crazy, I hope you can escape quickly and that New Years’ makes up for it.  For everyone that I didn’t send cookies to, here’s one of my favorite pieces of Christmas music from one of my favorite movies:

Hopefully it makes you as happy as it does me!

Cultural destruction

Posted by on . One comment.

The Spaniards did all in their power to crush the religious spirit of the Inca. In a manual published early in the seventeenth century as a guide for missionaries, Pablo José de Arriaga offered simple advice for priests confronting idolatry. “Everything that is inflammable is burned at once,” the priest wrote, “and the rest broken into pieces.” Arriaga himself spent a year and a half in Peru during which time he alone was responsible for the destruction of 603 huacas, 3,418 household shrines, 617 ancestral mummies, and 189 field shrines.

From One River, by Wade Davis.

You are right to be disgusted with Arriaga’s actions, but the US is not so different. Because of the war we started, Iraq’s cultural heritage is quickly disappearing.

Sometimes Spam is Brilliant

Posted by on . No comments.

I glance at the spam akismet catches every once in awhile just to make sure it isn’t eating any valid comments.  Most of it is nonsensical, dull, and/or incredibly long lists of links to bad porn sites.  But every once in awhile, a spam comment is amazing. For example:

There could be frogs that possess subpar powers to hurdle jet planes while working on my car. This makes us angry and avenged at the same time.

I feel like this scenario needs to be the basis for an anime.

Cookies for Christmas

Posted by on . 5 comments.

Some very lucky people who read this blog have a package on the way.  Bet you can’t guess what’s inside!

Making lots of cookies to give to people I love is one of my favorite things about the winter holidays, even if it does lead to a kitchen covered in flour and powdered sugar.  This year I made chewy ginger chocolate cookies and plain old sugar cookies.  The chewy ginger chocolate cookies are definitely more crunchy than chewy, but that just makes them better for dipping in milk, right?  I also realized putting red sprinkles on little people shaped cookies isn’t the best idea: some people are getting zombie cookies for Christmas.

If I’m clever and put an apron on, at least the mess is limited to the counters and an apron I can just toss in the wash.  This year, I was not so clever.  Notice the clean apron hanging behind me.

Those packages are smaller than normal this year.  Based on the resemblance between me in this photo and a stick figure, I decided that I needed to eat more cookies.

Getting wireless to work in Ubuntu with a Broadcom 4306 (rev 3)

Posted by on . 2 comments.

After a few weeks of tinkering, the wireless is finally working in Ubuntu on the laptop my aunt sent me.

My new (old) laptop is a Dell Inspiron 9200 with a Broadcom 4306 (rev 3) wireless card.  In theory, all I needed to do to get the wireless working was grab the firmware and activate the drivers.  Despite nothing appearing to go wrong during that process and everything ‘looking’ right, I couldn’t even scan for networks, let alone connect to one.  So, after reading approximately 45,917 forum posts, 17,337 how-to guides, and tinkering a bit, I gave up on using the Linux drivers.

Then I found this how-to guide on Broadcom 4306 and Ndiswrapper and Windows drivers for my card here (via davidwatson.org). Approximately 6 minutes later my wireless is working and my laptop is no longer tethered to the router.

Hooray!

Understanding comes too late

Posted by on . No comments.

Rain Forest In Brazil Are Cleared And Burned By Settlers For Farmland

Rain Forests In Brazil Are Cleared And Burned By Settlers For Farmland

Nothing thrills the Waorani more than killing game and cutting down big trees. It’s what so many people don’t understand who haven’t lived in the forest. You don’t have to conserve what you don’t have the power to destroy. Harming the forest is an impossible concept for them. The fact that they use every part of an animal has nothing to do with a conservation ethic, and everthing to do with hunger.”

“They don’t know what it means to destroy.”

“They have no capacity to understand. In a world of such abundance, the word ‘scarcity’ has no meaning. It’s what makes them most vulnerable. It’s the same with their culture. When you’ve lived in complete isolation, how can you understand what it means to lose a culture? It’s not until it is almost gone and when people have become educated that they realize what’s being lost. By then the attractions of the new way are overpowering and the only people who want the old ways are the ones who never lived it.”

From One River, by Wade Davis.