this week i

caught 400 years of the telescope at nasm, learned spherical axis rotation and movement around the sun have no relationship; our 24 hr day/365 day year is 5832 earth hours/224.7 earth days on venus and 10 earth hours/4330 earth days on jupiter.. venus days > venus years.

awoke to an npr report on mersenne primes, agreed with interviewee's analogy between these numbers and the hope diamond: neither has utility, they're just pretty. also felt the windows program you can download to help look for the next one - the great internet mersenne prime search (gimps) acronym - doesn't help computer geeks trying to shatter the stereotype of being sniveling weaklings.

linked american community survey (census) data to some other health data sets at the zip code and puma levels, imputed poverty categories, felt pretty good about it; now we can add census variables to anything with county or zip identifiers.

imputed missing poverty data for our disability survey (2003 edition), followed the nhis multiple imputation technique.

lunched on this (~$8) every day, need to go back to cooking my own sushi (~$4) with brown rice.

began reading what is quickly becoming my bible, got me thinking: seems vanishingly improbable to be born a 21st century human, given 200,000+ years of existence? actually, almost 6% of all humans to ever live might be 21st century ones.

recommend sin nombre, exciting fiction.

thought ya might wanna practice more before you show off on pennsylvania avenue...


...though the embarrassment award goes to...


...otherwise bhangra blowout at constitution hall was flawless.



vcu got some trophy,


but at amsterdam falafel, everyone's a winner.

resolved to "perish resisting, and, if nothingness is what awaits us, let us not act in such a way that it would be a just fate."

4/16/09