Blog of Bermanism

Well, it is a sad day in the land of science fiction and fantasy as Ricardo Montalban has died at 88 years old. Montalban was probably best known for his role as Mr. Roark of Fantasy Island, but to all of you geek-boys and -girls out there, he played the role of Khan Noonien Singh in the Star Trek feature film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The famous overacting performance that was given by William Shatner in that movie featured Captain Kirk screaming “KHAAANNNN!!” several times with a look of extreme constipation on his face after being marooned on a planet by Khan with no obvious escape. Never-the-less, Montalban gave an amazing performance in this movie and it is a sad day that sees his passing. Khan’s final dying words in the Star Trek movie were quoted from Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick, “To the last, I will grapple with thee… from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!” RIP Ricardo.

Today’s xkcd is not just awesome, it’s hawesome:

Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to take the most difficult path to something potentially simple. I’m really good at graspong complex topics and coming up with crazy ways of doing complex things, but I suck at seeing the obvious things that are right in front of my face. So this xkcd totally fits. I would have done something similar.

I don’t know what it is, but the media has really been annoying me lately (this isn’t true, they usually annoy me, which is why I usually get my news from Fark, but that’s another story). Recently though, their inanity has reached new heights. A lot of really horrible things are happening in the world from Israel’s relentless bombing of the West Bank which is killing thousands of innocent people, starvation, a standoff with Iran, the killing of nearly 500,000 people in Iraq during our massively inappropriate war, the American economy is in shambles, and global warming is on the rise (as evidenced by our 80 degree day this January the 13th here in San Francisco). Not only that but we’re about to instate a new president of the United States, one that will hopefully fix a lot of the bad things that have happened over the last eight years. And, Obama’s administration has basically already taken control of the government and will be going full-steam next Tuesday when he is inaugurated, which I really like. Way to take charge Barack!

Yes, all of these very important things are happening, as well as many others that I haven’t listed here, and our very way of life is in serious jeopary. But, what topic has the media all in a frenzy? What topic has all of the major networks devoting entire teams, massive amounts of air time, the soliciation of expert interpretations, and has network executives peeing on themselves over? That’s right folks, the single most important news story of 2009 so far is…. drum roll please…. THE KIND OF FREAKIN’ DOG THAT OBAMA IS GOING TO BUY HIS CHILDREN!!!!! This is quite possibly the most inane display of misappropriation of resources and the biggest waste of time I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m mean seriously, who the hell cares whether they are going to get a Poruguese Water Dog or a Labradoodle?? I mean really!! A Google search for “the first dog obama” yields, count them, 3,440,000 results. The Today show this morning did an entire segment on the two possible breeds and how either of them is, “such a wonderful family breed”. I mean, really. Who is getting rich off of this? Someone must be, because I think I’d rather see a segment on watching paint dry.

The only other side of this that I can think of is that some executive somewhere, or some white house press secretary thought that focusing on the first family’s first dog would somehow take America’s mind off of the dismal current situation, either that or it would allow the world to identify more with the first family, but I still don’t give a crap. And, I can’t imagine that Obama feels any differently, I know it would annoy the crap out of me (obviously). Anyway, sorry for the rant. I’ll write something plesant next time, but this was really getting to me and thought I would share with you.

Happy puppy hunting.

Patent trolls (and all others that exploit the system for their own benefit) should kindly die in a fire. This case was particularly annoying to me. This guy patented the use of an ancillary internet website to enhance the look and feel of physcial products, like books. The definition of the patent is really broad, which means that it can be interpreted any number of ways. Slashdot users had some good comments on the subject. The biggest problem here, in my opinion, is that there are really no rules about what can be patented, except that it can’t have an active patent or patent pending. I think that only real property should be patentable, something tangible, like an algorithm in software or a revolutionary type of toaster that could toast your bread from where ever you are in the house; that sort of thing. But, patenting a generalized idea that has a wide range of applications? It is a little weird. To patent an idea, you should have a demonstrated, unique application for it that already exists, and you should only be able to patent that particular application. We went through a similar situation in the biological sciences a few years back when people started patenting biological processes and enzymes (PCR), and DNA sequences that are found in nature that have commercial application. The result of this was all out warfare. The PCR patent, for instance, was a patent on the use of Taq polymerase for the amplification of sequences of DNA. Anyone could go and get their hands on a few cells-worth of Thermophilus aquaticus (the bacterium that makes Taq) and isolate their DNA polymerases, but, thanks to this patent, you couldn’t use that enzyme in a PCR reaction without paying a licensing fee to Perkin-Elmer (now Applied Biosystems), who patented the process and made it such that no other company could develop the machines to perform PCR (called thermocyclers) without paying Perkin-Elmer through the nose for it, essentially creating a monopoly. And, they made it all very expensive. This patent, and other patents like it in the biological sciences made things very bad. Likewise, patenting the use of the internet to enhance one’s experience of a product that they have purchased is ridiculous. Of course companies are going to infringe on this patent because it is the natural thing to do with the state of technology as it is currently. So, Scott C. Harris, being a renowned patent lawyer, obviously created this patent with dollar signs in his eyes because he could sue almost anyone for infrigement (as he has done in the past, and it cost him his job). So, big boy here has gone after Google and lost, and now he’s set his sights higher, to Oprah. As is stated in the Slashdot comments, Oprah is probably the most powerful and influential woman in the world. Going up against her might be worse than Google. I hope she fights it and takes this guy down, because it is ridiculous and he obviously didn’t learn from losing his job at his law firm after going after Google. What an ass cake.

The new year at the Marin Rowing Association marks the beginning of training for the San Diego Crew Classic, which falls on April 4-5 this year. That’s right, we spend four months training for this one race. It is kind of ridiculous, but it is always fun to train hard and starting early is how we go beat the Olympic rolodex crews that show up every year. Anyway, my team has an erg test next Thursday, a 20 minute test in which you basically have to row as far and hard as you can (in meters) in 20 minutes. There is no easy erg test, but, next to the 2,000m test, this is the hardest and you really have to plan your piece.

Anyway, in preparation for this test, my friend Hanns came up with a pretty hard erg workout that we did this morning. The workout was 4 x 2,000m with 7min rest at your target 20min pace. For those non-rowers, we measure our current rowing speed in meters rowed per 500m. That number is our split. My best split ever on a 20min erg test was 1:50.3, or 5,443 meters in 20 min. My goal for the test next week is to finally break the 1:50 split mark and go in the 1:49’s, which would also finally allow me to break the 5500 meter mark. So, for this crazy workout of Hanns’, I decided to make my target split 1:49. The first piece was much harder than I expected. I was really beat about 1000m into the piece, but I was holding a 1:48.5 (I also didn’t really have time to warm up at all). But, I finished the first piece and finally felt warmed up. The second piece was even harder. I don’t know why exactly, but it was really hard until I got through the 1000m mark, then it got easier. The third piece was probably the easiest of the pieces to maintain, but it hurt a lot to make it through. Up until this point, I’d been sub 1:50 the whole time, which I was pretty happy with, and by the end of the third piece, I had gone 6,000m, which was further than my 20min test, but I was totally exhausted by the end of that piece, and we still had another one to do. I started the last one and just couldn’t get my split below 1:52. I was disappointed, because if I could keep all of my splits below 1:50, then I could do that for 20min. But, at 1000m to go, I realized that I could bring up my stroke rate and pull my splits down, so I went up to 29-30spm (I had been rowing at 27-28spm up until now) and got my split down below 1:50. At 500 to go, I was really going to lose it, so I did the natural thing and went psycho on the rate. I went up to a 32, then up to a 34 at 250 to go, holding a 1:46 through the end. My average for all pieces ended up being 1:49.6, which is in the realm that I want to be in for the 20min test. So, I was pretty happy with it over all, but it was really hard. I realized half way through the pieces that this was the first high-rate work that I’d done on the erg for several months, so I’m not surprised that it hurt so much. But, I’m very happy that I did it. Hanns has an even worse workout planned for Sunday, 3 x 3,000 meters with 10min rest at the same pace as the 2k’s. That’s going to be super hard, but much more approximate to a 20min test. So, that will be interesting. I’ll make sure to get some sleep the night before, Sasha willing.

The most interesting thing about doing really hard work on the erg is that a lot of making it through any hard piece is completely in your head. It is all about how much of the pain you can ignore. I’m in pretty good shape for guy whose 5′8″, 156lbs, so I know my body can handle the work load. It is a matter of convincing my mind that I can do it. When I over come those mental barriers, it all goes much better. I’ve also found that I can apply this mentality to all parts of my life, work, personal, and otherwise. It is interesting the lessons that you can learn from the simplest things, like killing yourself on an erg workout. You always grow from it. Anyway, just thought I’d share my pain from this morning with all of you.

This is the obligatory first blog post of the New Year in which I wish everyone a healthy and happy and recession-reducing new year. We spent the New Year in Lake Tahoe at my cousin’s best friend’s cabin. It was a great time, and certainly much more successful than the last time we tried to have New Years at that cabin. Rachel (who can’t ski because of bad knees) was good enough to volunteer to stay home at the cabin with Sasha while the rest of us went off and skied our hearts out in the way-better-than-normal early season conditions at Squaw and Northstar. I think I really needed to bomb down some mountains to re-center myself after this last year, so I’m very grateful that Rachel is supportive enough to have a not-so-exciting weekend so that I can. If she wasn’t willing, I’d probably never ski again. Anyway, I had a wonderful time skiing with my cousin and her husband (which, I guess, makes him my cousin too). The lift lines were short, the mountains were pretty much empty and the snow was great. We managed around 16-17 runs each day, so my legs are pretty blitzed, but it was a great first few ski days of the season and I really feel like I got my ski legs back under me.

So, now that I have my skiing addiction tamed for the time being, it is time to turn our attention to 2009. I do, in fact, have some New Year’s Resolutions. I’m writing them in my blog for all to see:

1. I want to be better at keeping in touch with people: I really let this fall off this year. I probably have about 10 people that I should keep in regular touch with. This isn’t a tall order and I just need to make the time for it. I also tend to let emails, texts, and voice mails go unanswered for a long period of time, and let’s not even talk about Facebook. I’ve gone two months without replying to people on there. So, I resolve to be better about communicating. I do actually have the time to do it, I just need to make it happen.
2. I want to move on to the next phase of my career in 2009. This is complicated beyond explanation, mainly because I’m not sure if I want to go into industry or academics. I suppose I’m going to wait and see what comes from my postdoc and then decide based on what I’m qualified for. So, this is my major resolution, and it is a big one, but it is time to move on in my career.

That’s it! I only have two resolutions. The rest of my life has been pretty awesome and I really wouldn’t change very much of it. I’ve been pretty lucky that way and I hope it continues. So, Happy New Year to all! I hope it finds all of you in comfort and good health.