Dateline 2/28

2 exams down, 2 more to go. I had my biomechanics exam today and found it surprisingly easy. also I finished up a paper for writing class and went to a review for thermodynamics. For some reason this semester all of the male TF's in my classes are idiots who can't teach while the female TF's are hot (with avg. teaching ability). Also there are the same number of guys and girls, which is unusual(see Opinion on women in science).
I sent a whole bunch of online recruiting letters for the camp I worked at last summer. I found email addresses fo student organizations that I thought would be interested and sent them a orwardable message. It worked last year, at least for the premed society. Also I sent out a bunch of messages on the facebook
There seems to be a blizzard outside and I need sleep...

Dateline 2/27

I went and played paintball today with my roomate ryan and a bunch of his friends. It was great! I havent done that since high school. The I went to that shady pet store on Harvard Ave. and bought tubing to finish off my most recent biomechanics project. actually that is pretty much the only stuff I did this weekend other than work and study. oh well, spring break is in 8 days...
also I went down to work out at the weight room and the entire time I was there the attendant was gone. actually that is the second time this week i went down there and found it empty. guess I am the only one who doesn't cheat on my shifts.

dateline 2/24

This has been one of the longest days of my life. Firt thing this morning I had an exam in Control systems that turne out to be harder than I expected. Then I got to have lunch with Dean Eisenberg as part of one of these roundtable discussions where students can give the administration feeback. Most of the time was spent listening to this one annoying senior who had a narrow view of what he thought engineering should be, and insisted on having each one of his points addressed by the Dean. I did not get much out of this so after about an hour I skipped out and joined my writing class (already in progress).
At least it was a good day for getting things done. After class I finished up my physiology labs which have been taking forever and later at work I finished the first phase of my MCAT reviewing. I need to prepare for the entrance exam but I cant afford Kaplan, so I got someone to sell me the old books and I set up my own review course. The first phase was to read all the subject material cover to cover and write all the stuff I didnt know in a notebook that I will study later. I have been working on this daily since January, and I am happy that it has finished on time.
Also today I got my roomates settled for next year and turned in my housing slip. I am going to live in the same apt. (I love this place) and I get to pull 2 people in. I decided to pull in my freshman roomate Al and his friend Simon who I met today for the first time. Should be a good year.
I picked up an official transcript today as well as a guide to writing cover letters, so I can apply for some summer internships over the weekend. I cant believe you have to pay $5 or it. They literally just type your name into the computer, print it out on the deskjet in the back and slap it in a letter envelope and hand it to you. The official university seal is just a regular stamp that says REGISTAR on it. I also got a new mp3 player today to replace my CD player which has seen better days. Its a cheap Korean knockoff of the ipod shuffle. Another success in my Never-ending quest to aquire consumer electronics at unreasonably low prices.
On a more disturbing note I got a belated valentines day card from my mother. she even sent some money, although not nearly enough to cover the housing deposit due today(which my father mentioned last month he would try to pay for me). The problem was that my mother wrote on the card that she could not send more or send it earlier(for instance on V-day) because the dog needed it and went on to describe his cysts(sadly not joking here). Now there are 2 posabilities regarding my parents; either my mother has no taste (not really a surprise there) or they remembered the housing thing, decided not to pay it, and are now trying to cover it up. I sent a pretty sarcastic email just now, so I will probably know for sure tommorow.
I have 3 exams next week and a 4 page research paper due tuesday that I have not even started. add to that taxes, financial aid, job applications and test prep and you can see its going to be a wonderful weekend.

Cool article

turning animal by-products into oil
I hope this works out. Now we can reduce waste and flaunt the Kyoto protocol at the same time...

Dateline 2/21 extra

wow, I forgot I had the first broomball game of the season tonight, but my roomate reminded me and i got there just in time. It was great, the other team was up by 2 early, but we came back in the third period to tie (I assisted both goals). It stayed tied and after a scorless overtime we went to a shootout. our first shooter scoed the only goal so we won our first game 3-2.

Opinion : Women in Science

One of the things that has come to my attention repeatedly in recent weeks are the comments made by Harvard president Larry Summers. In short, he said that there may be physiological differences in women that make them not want to go into academic sciences and possibly not be as good at them. Now this pissed off feminists everywhere and caused a big public commotion, with many people twisting his words in different directions. But instead of looking at the actual quotes (which you can interpret for yourself), lets look at the bigger issue he brings up.

First of all, there is a huge difference between the number of men and women in the sciences; the higher you go, the bigger the difference. Almost 70% of engineering students at some schools(including mine if you take out biomed.) are male (and more than 80% of the faculty). This is made worse by the fact that in most other majors, and in college overall, women outnumber men(and by a wide margin BU). So the obvious question is why?, followed by , what can we do about it? Now this is what was bothering Summers, and I have to assume that he considered and ruled out many factors. So he did what any good academic would do, he suggested more research and studies in the areas that he thought might be the problem. So why do women not go into science and why do the ones who do rarely succeed at the highest levels? Now this is a difficult question because there are no obvious answers. Outright discrimination was ended many years ago, before any current students were even born. All schools and employers in these fields are equal opportunity (if not affirmative action). Maybe pressure from friends or relatives is a factor for children, but certainly not in advanced college levels. Some (mostly feminists) say that its partly because women are having children during prime period for advancing their careers, but I see no reason why you can’t be creative or do math while you are pregnant. That doesn’t seem to be a problem for women in fields such as writing or psychology either. So that leaves us to consider that maybe its because women just don’t do as well on technical tasks or find them as interesting, and this could clearly be tied to a known difference between men and women: physiology

Clearly, men and women are different. There are genetic differences (in one pair of chromosomes) that make us who we are. And since most genes in humans are expressed in the brain, there will necessarily be differences in the way we think, feel, and act. It is rather obvious that men and women act differently. Not all men have exactly the same personality, but there are certain things they share that would distinguish them from any woman. Moreover, while no one will dispute emotional differences, it has always been held sacred that intellectually, men and women are the same. Summers suggested (and I will second) that probably they are not, and that this is the reason for the difference we see in the sciences. This would make sense, and good questions lead to good science. Unfortunately feminists have effectively blocked all research into this area for years, and look what a controversy erupted when research into it was even suggested. I personally think that we would find some correlation between male development and spatial vs. verbal reasoning differences. Knowing the underlying causes would probably give us the necessary insight to correct the problem, but instead we seem destined to continue on in ignorance.

The negative publicity surrounding this issue is pretty much going to stop anyone from studying these problems. This will allow Political-Correctness activists and feminists to continue to impose their baseless ideology on science. Ironically, this will probably hurt their efforts to bring about equality to the field itself.

Dateline 2/21

Alright, maybe I was wrong about spring - there is now 6 inches of snow outside. But i had the day off for presidents day anyway and the only thing i needed to go to today was canceled for non-weather reasons so i had nothing to do. nothing except the work I had been putting off the last 4 days. I got it done though, and also went grocery shopping and played basketball at Case with Hiren and John(although I lost). The rest of this week is going to be rough, however...

Dateline 2/20

Its been a good weekend for sports. After work on Saturday, I went to the BU-Umass hockey game (thanks for the tickets Jason). If BU stays hot, we could really make a run in the NCAA’s. Then I came back to the apt and played board games with a bunch of people my roommates girlfriend knew from high school. Lots of fun though I got killed in Monopoly. on Sunday, I covered someone else’s 4 hr shift and then went to the basketball game with my roommates. Unfortunately, BU always seems to play like crap when I go to games. Either way, I watched TV or a while and then worked on my 2 labs that are due this week. One thing I don’t do nearly enough of is watch TV. We got free cable in the dorms this semester but I have no time to take advantage of it. I always try to watch if there is a new Simpson’s episode on though.

Dateline 2/18

A good end to a boring week, but at least spring is finally here (I can see water in the Charles as of Thursday) This has been a pretty good day. After sleeping in by about 2 hrs, I got up in time to go on a tour of BU’s new athletic complex. WOW! It is incredible. Almost worth the $120 mil. they spent on it. The 5 story facility includes among other things, Olympic size swimming facilities, an indoor lazy river, dozens of basketball and squash courts, the longest indoor track I have ever seen (partially suspended above the B-Ball courts), and tons of fitness equipment. Unfortunately one of the officials there admitted that it won’t be open until April first because of some construction set backs and some problems with training staff. If I were a senior, I would be pissed…

Getting back from this I realized I was completely out of clothing so I made my monthly trip to the laundry room and did no fewer than 4 loads of laundry. Anyway I had to leave that early and go to a review class for control systems, which was naturally scheduled at the same time as a Fedora developers conference. The Photonics building was therefore mobbed with weirdest, dorkiest people on earth. And I only noticed this because they stood out from the usual nerds that populate the place 24/7 (like me). This wasn’t a problem until I tried to mooch some free refreshments and they actually yelled at me. I am now officially stopping trying to get BU Linux to run on my computer (fedora is the crappiest kind of Linux I have ever tried by the way).

Opinion : Lawsuits

It has come to my attention that Bush is finally passing some anti-lawsuit regulation. Now while this does not nearly go far enough in my opinion, it is certainly a good start. I understand that lawsuits do a lot of good, and sometimes people really do need to be compensated, but there is a serious side effect that of our “litigation culture” that is rarely discussed. The problem that I have been noticing recently, particularly in healthcare areas, is that consumers are losing there freedom to choose. The problem is that because companies are afraid of lawsuits, they are not selling as many products or allowing certain procedures, even if they are fine for the vast majority of people.

Look at the recent problems with pain relief drugs like Vioxx. The risk when taking these drugs is that some people(less than 1 in 100000 at normal doses) may develop strokes or heart problems. Now we must note that first of all these drugs are usually prescribed to elderly people who have painful arthritis, and that second, these drugs work. All medical decisions are supposed to be made on a risk/benefit analysis, with the patients having the final say. Now if you are an 80 year old with crippling arthritis, are you going to choose pain and long odds, or a much more comfortable albeit marginally shorter life? I am not going to answer that, the point is that you should have the choice. Thanks to Merck being scared of litigation (which hasn’t even been filed) you no longer do. I personally have used the disputed drug Accutane, which is miraculous for acne. Apparently, there are lawyers who believe that this makes people commit suicide, because of course, letting teenagers have lower self esteem (because of their looks) would be much better. Newsflash : teenagers sometimes commit suicide and old people die. What happens before is that person’s business, not lawyers or corporations.

More examples are all over the place. What if you want your cup of coffee a little extra hot so it is still warm when you are done driving to work? Not going to happen thanks to someone suing McDonalds after spilling it on themselves. Like your fries with trans fat (extra crispy). Too bad (that lawsuit uncovered the startling realization that McDonalds food is unhealthy for you) Want to enjoy a game of lawn jarts? Not in some states. Most companies won’t even lease you a car in New York State anymore, you need to go through a special buyer program so the auto dealer isn’t liable for your inability to drive. And what is the end result of this? Lawyers make extravagant amounts of money and insurance premiums, from auto to health, skyrocket. Do you think that the money from the settlements from Vioxx are going to come from Merck’s shareholders or the executives? It is going to come out of the medical research budgets so that it will ironically take longer to find safer alternatives. Moreover, like McDonalds, they will probably just defray the costs by charging you more for their products as if prescription drug costs aren’t already high enough. Anyway, here’s hoping this new legislation will slow these suits down. Now if we could only pass caps on medical malpractice…

Great article:
New York Liberals for Bush?

Opinion : Biomedical Engineering

"Biomedical Engineering...The best BS at Boston University" -Prof Lutchen

The Boston Globe has an article today that MIT is adding a new major for the first time in decades. That major: Bioengineering. The globe seems to think that this is a revolutionary new development, but the fact is that MIT is behind the times. There are dozens, if not hundreds of other similar programs in this country, and nothing that I have seen suggests MIT's program will be anything revolutionary. It will be nationally renowned of course, but only because MIT and its endless list of corporate sponsors will pour millions of dollars into it and use its undue influence to retain the best researchers. As a student of biomedical engineering across the river at BU, I am surprised that this is a news-worthy issue. I am happy if, as the globe claims, this will add legitimacy to the field, but I don't think anything will really change. MIT has been operating the Whitehead institute for years and always provides the research side of the Harvard Medical School, both of which technically count as biomedical engineering. They have made huge contributions in areas such as medical instrumentation and bioinformatics, and I don't see what difference it makes if they change the wording on a few undergraduate degrees. Here at BU we have had biomedical engineering for over 20 years. And we are not alone. ABET has accreditation requirements for these programs and there are honor societies and publications tied to them. The field is well established. In short, this is not a revolutionary event; this is merely an excuse for a monolithic institution to spend more money on research and hire more scientists.

disclaimer: I am at BU partly because i got rejected at MIT

Opinion : NHL lockout

By now, the NHL season is pretty much canceled. And I really love Hockey. As a fan, I am more worried about the long term survival of the league, however. The problem is that the economics of Hockey just don’t make sense.

The league has expanded rapidly in the last few years, and on the surface seems about the same as any other major sport, but the problems the NHL faces are unique. First of all, they have never been the most popular sport in the first place. NFL and NBA salaries have grown roughly proportional to their fanbase for many years now. The problem with hockey though is that its biggest support is in Canada, where they just don’t have the number of people compared to big league American cities. The NHL for its part recognized the problem and began moving teams out of Canada and into big American cities. (namely Denver, Miami, Carolina, and Dallas among others) The problem is that it is hard to draw new fans to a winter sport in a warm area and this goes back to the fundamental reason that the NHL lacked wide appeal in the first place. Meanwhile it alienated many of its biggest fans in places like Winnepeg, Hartford, and Minnesota. And this is only the beginning.

The next huge problem is player salaries. As in other sports, player salaries have grown wildly, but unlike football and basketball, they have been largely unchecked by official policies. Starting with the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a flood of talent into the NHL from other countries. Instead of decreasing salaries (think more supply of talent and same demand), payrolls went from growing steadily to exponentially. This is just bad economics. To make matters worse, most teams tried to compensate for this by raising ticket prices just as fast, which had the consequence of chasing even more fans away from the game. The results have been obvious; I went to a bruins game at the Fleet center 2 years ago and it would have been generous to say the place was at half capacity. (and this was a first place team in a traditional hockey city mind you) One look at the ticket prices would explain the whole thing however. Who is going to bring their family to a game when seats on the first level will set you back around $80 per seat (and those are not even the most expensive ones).

Apparently, the NHL was trying to steer a course between the team independent policies of baseball and the parity of the NBA, but they ended up with the worst parts of both. In the baseball system, teams (read: Yankees) can speculate salaries all they want, but this system ensures that the teams with the huge payrolls are the ones that are also making the most money; whether you are a small team with a small payroll or a big team with a big payroll everyone wins(financially at least). In the NBA, there is revenue sharing and caps, so the teams all have about the same amount of money to spend on talent. The NHL tried to make a system that essentially allowed everyone to speculate salaries and buoyed this system by letting most teams in the league make the playoffs. This caused poor teams to have big payrolls and not surprisingly, 2 teams have already gone bankrupt and several claim to be on the edge. Yet the players union does not want to compromise and accept any policy that will both cut salaries and stop future growth, while the owners claim that their cant be a long term solution without both.

To be honest, I have to side with the owners on this one. Whether the league as a whole is losing money, the players are taking to much of it. Here are some suggestions for the NHL to get back on track: First, adopt an NBA style salary cap and salary maximums and reduce player salaries across the board by at least 20%. Second, make the owners swallow the current deficits and pass those 20% savings on to the ticket buying fans. Next either reduce the number of teams, or move at least 2 back to Canada. Finally shorten the season by about 2 months and cut the number of playoff teams in half. Whether the NHL will bounce back in the near future remains to be seen, but if they do, it will only be through huge changes

Dateline 2/14

Valentines Day, and I have no date. But I did have beanpot tickets. And BU won! Awesome game with Chris Borque winning it in OT! Not much else of the day that I remember at this point. During the game, my friend Bryan called me from his college in NYC and asked me for the definition of Magnetic flux.

Apparently the guy who bought the naming rights to the management school building got killed by terrorists in Lebanon. In other news, heads of terrorist states are allowed to sit on the BU board of trustees…

GO TERRIEERS!

Opinion : Steroids in baseball

So Jose Canseco has now admitted that he and Mark McGwire used steroids. First of all, does this surprise anyone? It is not a coincidence that the season homerun mark started being broken on a yearly basis at around the time that designer steroids and drugs like EPO started to become available (they which don’t show up in urine drug tests). And it has been said many times that baseball really doesn’t test that much anyway. But does all this really matter? Sure it is a shame that players feel the need to cheat to win, but I would argue that they are the ones who will lose in the end. Part of being the best at something is having a psychological edge, and if that edge means taking risks with your health, than go for it. If you are willing to put your life on the line for what you do, then you deserve to be better at it and get recognized as such (ask someone in the marines). After all the fans and the media gets what it wants(more scoring). It’s the players who will suffer the lifelong consequences of messing with their physiology (see Ken Caminiti). Many people, from John McCain to Newsweek magazine claim that the real problem with this is that younger men will use steroids. This is much more serious because you will do a lot more damage to yourself when you are still growing. Yet wouldn’t testing at college and amateur levels prevent this? Teenagers trying to make the football team aren’t going to have access to designer drugs, let alone chemists and personal trainers to help them cover it up. As far as drugs go, I have always been a fan of personal responsibility. These drugs are not addictive and the side effects are well known. If you make a choice to do that to yourself, deal with the consequences. Moreover, don’t begrudge professional athletes their own stupid choices. I would rather live to see my grandchildren than hit 4 extra homeruns in a season but I would also buy tickets to see Barry Bonds play.

Dateline 2/13

Today was a good day for getting things done. After oversleeping and blowing off covering someone else’s shift at work, I finally got over to microcenter and replaced my broken mouse. Then I finished a paper that is due Tuesday about Hawthorne’s story “The Artist of the Beautiful”. We had to take Freudian Psychology principles and analyze it, which turned out to be pretty easy, even though I am not a big fan of Freud. I also put the finishing touches on this phase of the informatics project I am working on. Basically it is a list of all the human chromosomal abnormalities associated with schizophrenia (along with a bunch of other mental conditions). I had to subdivide it by type of mutations and conditions and then make graphs based on their relative frequencies. After that, I got a bunch of new songs off of i2 hub to try to listen to some new music. I really don’t get to listen to the radio any more so every month or so I go to the website of a station I used to like and download the songs that are on their playlist. I also arranged for my old scoutmaster (who is now a family friend) to write me a med board recommendation letter to make up for the one that AHRC has supposedly lost. Well time to go watch adult swim…

Opinion : Global Warming

Another round of political negotiating over the Kyoto protocol seems to be on the horizon, now that Tony Blair has made it his priority this year to get the US on board with the Kyoto treaty. Good luck Tony. Not going to happen. It is time to face reality on 2 fronts, 1, why the US won’t scale back its CO2 production and 2, how much of a problem is global warming anyway.

Nobody is really against lowering emissions in this country but now an obvious question: where are the cuts going to come from? First, industrial production in this country is just as efficient (or close) and environmentally safe as in any other western country (EU, Japan). Let us face it, computers do not burn oil. So why does the US produce so much emissions? What do we do that is fundamentally different from say the Japanese? The answer is driving long distances and more frequently, and driving bigger cars. So basically, to bring the US in line with the rest of the world the government would need to essentially tell people when and what to drive. I would love t see Blair come over and try that…Not a big surprise that neither party is in favor of that solution. Of course, the only viable alternative would be to force huge cutbacks on American industry that make them uncompetitive and penalize them on behalf of the American public. Also a ridiculous alternative.

So what should we do, just sit back, and toast? How bad could global warming be? Well, actually not that bad. Apparently the temperature is rising a few degrees every 100 years or so and the polar ice caps are melting. This threatens to raise water levels marginally and increase extreme temperatures in extreme regions. So what. People seem to claim that this will make violent weather phenomena and kill thousands of people who live near shorelines. Yet there is no evidence that weather is getting anymore violent. And when it comes to rising water levels killing people, I must point out that a hurricane storm surge raises the water level at the shorelines by many feet in a few hours, and how many people died this year in the Florida hurricanes? Maybe 2? A few inches in a 100 years …RUN… Human beings and all other life has adapted to climate change for millions of years, and will continue to do so. The current rate of temperature change is barely more that the earth would expect in a warming period, and I suspect that some of that discrepancy has to do with the fact that there weren’t a lot of digital thermometers or climate monitoring satellites 2 million years ago. And finally, anyone who tells you that irreversible damage is occurring is a crackpot. It is fact that the earth has gone between much warmer and much colder periods and always come back around. That is the way that the global ecosystem works. Nothing is irreversible. The ozone hole is closing up nicely…Anyway I have to go outside and enjoy the snow before my love of driving turns Boston into a warm/mild cesspool (like Washington DC).

Dateline 2/11

The first thing I did today was had my resume reviewed by a college sponsored job-finding professional. Turns out my first copy had about 50 errors (only a 1.5 page document mind you). Apparently using the MS office template is a fate worse than death. After a marathon editing session I made it to the summer internship job fair, which was crappy and under attended even by the career services office's standards. Their were few employers there that had anything remotely to do with my field, although I did find 2 good possibilities. One was a local healthcare consulting firm; the other was the federal government. This is the second time in 2 weeks i have run across a sweet summer job opportunity. Last week it was with the patent and trademark office, this time it is with the national park service. Now the good thing about doing a summer internship with the man is that unlike companies that promotes experience and connections, and use this as an excuse to pay you a $3000 stipend, the govt. just puts you on the payroll as an employee, so you can make nearly $12K as a park ranger or a patent clerk. I would be particularly suited to this as well because I do not need industry connections in engineering if I am going to medical school anyways, and in the park service case, they apparently supply housing.
This whole job search thing is not that big a deal to me, however because i already have a job that I have worked in over the past 2 summers. And this bring me to the other problem i had today because for some reason they still have not given me letter of recommendation that I can use for my med school application. Time is running out (due Feb. 21st) and they are impossible to get a hold of. I was told earlier in the week that they would get back to me by today, but they have not and i am getting annoyed. It’s a great cause and they run a good program, but they have no clue how to run a business, and I have come to expect some professionalism from people i deal with. I am sure I will be revisiting this later. Anyway, the Russians are coming over to hang around so I out until tomorrow.

Dateline 2/10

First daily post. I just got done at work and it has been a long day. I have a really easy workstudy job, they basiclly pay me to sit in the basement in the building i live in and do my homework or work out. this allows for very efficient use of my time, as i can study, excersise and get payed at the same time. thats the only way I can work out 6 hrs a week with my busy schedule.

First post

hello world.


obligatory test message

autobiographical stuff

excerpted from an essay I wrote about myself recently:

Once when asked to ‘sum yourself up in one sentence’, I responded: “I am too complex to be described in one sentence.” (The interviewer gave me a puzzled look and told me think about it a little more) While it is difficult to pin down my personality, I will try to give you an idea of who I am as a person by answering some simple questions and letting you draw the conclusions. My favorite color is red and I like chocolate. As far as politics, I tend conservative and would make a good presidential candidate. I am a proud American, and look with disdain on my fellow citizens (or anyone for that matter) who does not appreciate what they have. My hobbies are computers, outdoors activities, and shooting, but I must admit I don’t own a gun or have enough time to contribute open source projects or go camping (fortunately I have friends who do). Before you get the idea that I am some kind of laptop toting redneck, I will also add that I have lived in big cities my whole life and was the best at interpreting Shakespeare in my high school class. My idols in no particular order are Richard Feynman, George W. Bush, Jesus, and my grandmother, who all did or do what they think was best, ignoring what people thought of them, and they have all been great successes because of it. My one guiding principal is to take responsibility for my actions, but I will admit, it is a lot easier when the outcomes are good. The event that had the biggest effect on me was probably when I was 6 and my uncle showed me how to play my first video game, Super Mario brothers, which pretty much accounts for the next ten years of my life. I have worked at numerous jobs, from part running in a warehouse to telemarketing; from taking care of the mentally handicapped to cleaning carpets. Despite being the most difficult, taking care of the handicapped people was the job I enjoyed the most, and admittedly is the only thing that I have mentioned here that has anything to do with me wanting to go into medicine.