Missing, Presumed Fed

It may appear that I've pulled a succession of Lig Lury, Jr.'s these last two weeks' worth of evenings. However, this editor hasn't been out grabbing food every night. I've actually just been trying to recover and catch up a bit from the semester, to get moving on summer research, and to take care of some business I've been putting off for a long time. More to come on that final front soon, I expect.

In other news...

This editor, I just discovered, is awesome. You should read his blog, especially in light of the sad track record of Sunday Judgment recently. All the magnificently nerdy copy-editor talk notwithstanding (my favorite line, regarding Myanmar v. Burma: "In any event, the State Department does not hold sway over our house style."), perhaps the most compelling reason to check out McIntyre's blog is here.

And this is so cool I won't even bother with an introduction, though I'll mention that I was sad it didn't get mentioned here. Friends of mine and I have been talking about taking a "spontaneously generated adventure" one of these days; let me know if you want to join in.

Toy Story -- Or -- A Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Code From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed

A few days ago, I handed in my last paper of the semester, a report on my development of TOLSTOY: Treatment Optimization with Linear Scoring TOY. I figure we need more codes named after famous writers (see, for example, CAFCA).

TOLSTOY's not going to answer any pressing research questions. It's a toy code for performing radiation therapy treatment planning calculations, a task I know laughably little about (especially considering I was once on track to become a medical physicist). But that's kinda the point. I think to really teach the concepts involved in doing any sort of complex calculation, you have to radically simplify the task. When we're not willing to do that, we risk spending so much curricular time laying theoretical foundations that we never help students see the forest for the trees.

I've always been especially bothered by this phenomenon, which David Ollis (whose work I've always admired) and some other folks at NC State describe here:

"Virtually all writing guides emphasize the importance of defining at the outset the direction and nature of the story to be told. Paradoxically, engineering curricula almost universally neglect this time-honored advice. Instead, most sentence the new student to math, physics, chemistry, humanities, and social sciences. Thus, one to two years pass by before any engineering courses of substance and example are offered. The student is launched upon a journey without clear definition of the voyage or description of the port of arrival. One result is found in the too-often heard remark, 'I didn’t see what engineering was all about until my final semester, when it all came together in the design project.'"

Thankfully, engineering educators increasingly seem willing to let first- and second-year students get their hands dirty with projects that try to strike a balance between authenticity and accessibility. That's what I was going for with TOLSTOY--a tool that a student could play with to learn something about treatment planning without having to understand every detail of radiation transport and optimization.

One of my favorite David Foster Wallace essay titles involves the CAFCA code's namesake. The essays is called "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," and I kinda feel like those last eight words should get tacked on to pretty much everything I write. But it should also serve as a guide for how we design teaching tools in the computational sciences. Without a kind of pedagogical Occam's razor to shave away as many of the befuddling details as possible, we don't have much hope of actually teaching anything at all.

Anyway, here's the paper. Sorry about some of the formatting; RefWorks wasn't kind to the citations, for some reason, and in my rush to finish my semester I didn't catch all the errors. By the way, the image above plots the dose distribution from a five-x-ray-beam treatment plan for --ridiculously--a spherical tumor in a cubical patient with no sensitive tissues to try to spare. It's a totally trivial example, but I thought it looked really cool.

Triple Take

In case you haven't heard, there was an unassisted triple play in the Cleveland-Toronto game last night. These have always been really, really exciting to me; I remember watching highlights of one when I was a seven-ish-year-old baseball nut living in Bradenton, FL (where the Pirates spring train, incidentally). I have the nagging sense that someone on the Reds turned it, and that it happened in a dome, but I haven't done the research to confirm either fact.

To give you some sense of how rare these things are, note that this was only the 14th such play in major league history. If I manage to track down some good video, I'll pass it along.

OK, I've been doing runs on TOLSTOY (more on this most recent project of mine soon) all morning and am ready to put myself into exile until the associated paper is finished. Catch you on the flip side.

Thanks to my friend Matt, by the way, for calling me last night with the news. I happened to be in a bar watching the Brewer game with his parents and fiancé at the time, but I never caught the highlight. Soon.

Update: Matt just sent me a little info that I thought I'd pass along:"You were right, the Unassisted TP has only happened one way, every time. It was usually catch, bag, and tag... but a few were catch, tag, and bag. Interesting stuff. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unassisted_triple_play"

Incidentally, I think we need a commonly accepted word that allows you to credit someone with doing some research but that also connotes a bit of flimsiness to that research because, in fact, it just involved finding the right Wikipedia article. How about wi-search? My only problem with this choice is that I'm worried about possible confusion with Nintendo-Wii-related words (e.g., Wiimote). Any thoughts?

Another update: I just did a little wi-search of my own and figured out why I remember that unassisted TP of yore so vividly--it came at the expense of my Pirates: "September 20 - Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Mickey Morandini completes the first unassisted triple play in the National League in 65 years against the Pittsburgh Pirates. In the bottom of the sixth inning, Morandini snares Jeff King's line drive, steps on second to double off Andy Van Slyke, and finally tags Barry Bonds out before he can return to first. It is the ninth unassisted triple play since 1901, but only the second to be pulled off by a second baseman."

And since I'm on a role:

I was just shattered to discover that my mind apparently created what I always thought was a sweet fact about two of those same Pirates. I had in my head that Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Andy Van Slyke comprised the starting National League outfield as Pirates in at least one All-Star Game. However, if my wi-search is to be believed (1 2 3), it looks like the intersection of their respective all-star season sets is {1993}. However, by that year Bonilla and Bonds had moved on to the Mets and Giants, respectively. It also turns out that Van Slyke sat out the game with an injury. So much for that special memory from my childhood.

OK, back to TOLSTOY.

Cleaning House

I'm trying to clean up my del.icio.us tags a bit. Here are a couple links I've been meaning to pass along:

CO2 Saver -- I'm in firm agreement with those who believe guilt isn't going to get us anywhere in solving environmental problems. I think the truth of the matter is that we start to make a difference when we stop feeling guilty and start trying to do what we can (thanks, Natalie and Casey). Here's one thing I think we can all do: install this small power management utility. Of course, we all probably could have handled this task on our own, but the CO2 Saver application does the work automatically. I just installed it and will keep you posted about whether it turns out to be a pain. It seems pretty unintrusive.

In Shift to Digital, More Repeat Mammograms -- A few years back, I wrote a paper on the migration to digital mammography, and when I saw this article I thought it was interesting to see how things are panning out. As you might expect, the transition from film to digital has been a little rocky, but the experts still seem to think it's gonna be worth it in the long run. Anyway, I've been thinking a fair bit about my radiation sciences days lately (partly because I'm trying to finish up my TOLSToy treatment planning code so my semester can be over), so I felt compelled to pass this along.

Pangramaday -- I noticed today that my friend Ryan is taking a week off from his daily pangram-composing discipline. What better time to check out his site and get caught up? I've always admired Ryan's verbal dexterity and have been enjoying this fun, easy read. I thought last Monday's entry was especially graceful.

Poor Union South

Hehe, those of you familiar with the UW-Madison campus may find this amusing:

"For 37 years, Union South has turned a cold shoulder to the campus. And the feeling, unfortunately, has been mutual. Unloved and underutilized, Union South's quirky design, and uninviting Soviet-style architecture will give way to a new South Campus Union that planners expect will be a "people magnet" that will invigorate the area.
Read more: http://www.news.wisc.edu/15204 "

Taco Town

This New York Times story about taco trucks in LA is just brilliant. A really carefully crafted feature story that's funny but hits on some serious socio-economic issues as it builds momentum. Any article that contains the expression "taco-loving public" should be shooting up the most-emailed list. It's currently at number 10, I noticed.

OK, back to work, but only because I don't have a car to go driving in search of the best carnitas. Seriously, I love carnitas.

I also love "Taco Town."

Update: Man, I'm having a bad couple of weeks w/r/t providing promised links. Should be fixed now above, or click here.

Wiscmail Down

The campus-wide e-mail servers here at UW-Madison seem to be down right now. If you're trying to get in touch with me via my main account and have somehow found your way here, note that you can reach me via my gmail account, a link to which appears in the second box on the top RHS of this page.

Non-Secular Programming

First, a Sports Night scene to set the mood:


CASEY: Finish the story.

DAN: The story is, we had a conversation. Seriously. Someone had clearly briefed her on my stuff with the public schools and I told her about my opposition to secular programs that are publicly financed. I really spoke up and she seemed to listen.

CASEY: You mean non-secular.

DAN: What do you mean?

CASEY: You don't oppose secular programs that are publicly financed. You oppose non-secular programs that are publicly financed.

DAN: Yes.

CASEY: Go on.

DAN: Wait.

CASEY: I'm right.

DAN: Are you sure?

CASEY: Non-secular means bound to religious guidelines. Secular means free of religion.

DAN: (Thinking.) Okay. I'm sure I got it right at breakfast.

CASEY: Fifty-fifty chance.

(DAN is still pondering the odds that he got it right.)

CASEY: So go on.

(A distracted DAN reaches for a change of clothes.)

DAN: I'm gonna go and change my clothes.

CASEY: Okay.

(DAN drops the clothes to the floor.)

DAN: I didn't get it right.

CASEY: I know.

DAN: I blew it.

CASEY: Yes.

DAN: I mixed up! I inverted the definitions of secular and non-secular!

CASEY: Looks like that might be the case.

DAN: Hilary Clinton thinks I'm an idiot!

CASEY: Either that or a religious bigot.


I wanted to open with a little levity as a heads up about some decidedly non-secular programming. I've talked about God and science previously on this blog, but the link below steps things up a theological notch, I think.

I was asked to preach at St. Francis House a couple Sundays back, and I decided that what I came up with was too CSC-ish not to post here. Of course, this blog isn't publicly financed, and I'm not a religious bigot (in fact, I've danced around some wording to avoid confronting a tough passage that one author calls "disturbing [] to our pluralistic ears," which mine decidedly are), but I nevertheless just wanted to mention the original context of the link below.

Anyway, feel free to have a look if you're so inclined (here).

Update: The link should be working now. Sorry, I thought I'd thoroughly tested that the place I'd posted it before was publicly accessible, but apparently it wasn't. Thanks to whoever brought it to my attention.

Local News of National Import

It's weird when you get news about your community from a national news source. Sadly, that happened today to this Madison, WI resident:

Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online (New York Times)

Was I the only one who hadn't heard about this? I'm not a very good local news consumer, so I guess I'm part of the problem at work here.

We'll miss you, Cap Times.

Sunday Judgment VII

Today's lesson: not all copy is created equal.

If you have the final responsibility (or even part of it) for the copy in some publication, I submit to you that it's a good rule of thumb to spend twice as much time copy editing the text in headlines, captions, etc. than you would on the same volume of text in some random paragraph. Why? Because everyone loves pointing out mistakes, and there's a much greater chance of others finding them when they're in conspicuous places. Cruelly, there's also a decreased chance of you, the copy editor, finding them, since it's easy to take their correctness for granted ("oh, I would have noticed an error in that cutline already").

It's 8:52 a.m. CST, and an online caption for a photo in the New York Times Magazine's "Young Gay Rites" article still has a pretty whopping error. Can you find it before they do?

Can This Just Be My Career?

My baseball partner-in-crime Matt sent me this awesome link to a New York Times story I missed about a month ago.

If you want to know how tons of nuclear engineers spend their time, look no further. We run simulations like the one in the article. Except instead of flipping these virtual weighted coins to see how simulated batters fair over the course of their careers, we're trying to see how simulated neutrons (or x-rays, or electrons, or whatever) fair over the course of their lifetimes (from their creation in the reactor or whatever until their eventual absorption or leakage from the system). Of course, for a binary process (e.g., DiMaggio either gets a hit or he doesn't) it's OK to visualize coin-flipping, but I think it's better to think of the "randomness driver" as the roll of a many, many-sided die--which is why the Men from Mars referred to this clever trick as a Monte Carlo method. (In fact, I used Monte Carlo to write this absurd little simulation, which happens to be about rolling dice.)

Man, writing baseball simulations for a living would maybe be my dream job. Hey, Baseball Prospectus: need any more modelers?

Playing Catch (-Up)

In honor of yesterday's beautiful weather and the associated (and long overdue) first game of catch, I checked out a couple of baseball blogs today.

Perhaps I'm too much of a Turnbow apologist, but I think this guy is partially misplacing the blame for today's Brewers loss. I was only listening to it on the radio, but it seems like base-running mistakes really cost us a chance to take the lead in the bottom of the eighth, which could have kept us in it. Nevertheless, I think Brewers Bar looks worth reading, so I've added it to the new Sports links at right. (Speaking of sports blogs, did you see this? I'd like to hear more about Cuban's viewpoint, which sounds a little hypocritical but is perhaps only superficially so.)

In other news (since I'm still just getting slammed at work and need to knock at least one story off the old ToBlog queue before I lose all my momentum), congratulations to Professors McMahon and Murphy on their recent teaching awards. Watch for Insights' interview with Regina Murphy in the next edition. I was there for the brown bag and thought she covered some really interesting stuff.

In the meanwhile, here's some wisdom from McMahon:

"He inspired me to think of students as 'candles to be lit, not vessels to be filled,'" she says. "I think of myself not as a conduit for facts, but as an exuberant tour guide introducing students to the joy of problem-solving and learning about the world around them."

We need more exuberance.

What I Did All Day

As it turns out, only this (click to enlarge):











It's getting to be that time of the semester where scheduling and time management become both more difficult (because the time-uncertainties in end-of-semester-type activities are so much greater) and more important (because of the number and importance of said activities). Case in point: the above plot took me all day to make, and I really only had to generate the dotted line today. It turns out that every time I've solved this particular two-region reactor physics problem (at least twice while studying for my qualifying exam), I've done it wrong. It took me about two hours to realize my mistake, another two to find and fix it, and another hour to find the additional mistakes I incorporated in moving my solution from one piece of software to another. I can't tell you how many other items were on my todo list today (including--I'm just realizing--eating lunch), which tasks of course I'm scrambling to do now (well, in about another two minutes, obviously). I'll try to explain this problem and plot some other time, since they're kind of interesting and have some bearing on the "What have we got to lose?" modeling question.

Anyway, I just wanted to sort of explain my absence from this space this week and see if anybody had suggestions for dealing with this problem of how you can manage your time when the tasks you're juggling are both more important and more unpredictable in terms of how much time they take to finish. As far as I can tell, the standard answers include "sleep less" and "forget to each lunch."

OK, back to work.

New Insights Online

I linked to the March edition of our College of Engineering's Teaching and Learning Insights newsletter last month, mostly because I'd written a piece for it. But it would be a shame if I didn't pass the April link along as well. This issue rules.

In particular, check out the feature about my friend and sometime collaborator Laura Grossenbacher and her work on WAC (that's Writing Across the Curriculum, not Western Athletic Conference) in engineering. This project's got it all--interdisciplinarity, technical writing, authentic learning, and more. So I guess by "it all" I mean "stuff I'm interested in." If you are too, check it out.

There's also a write-up of our journal club's most recent article and a piece on using blogs for assessment. Geez, they're productivity tools, assessment tools, brainstorming tools...makes me wonder why it took me so long to get back in the blogging game.

Science News: Patterns

All the stories that caught my eye in this week's Science News digest had to do with violated patterns.

(1) I was checking out the videos of the big Intel young scientist competition finalists and was pleased to see a few non-biological scientists getting some recognition. It seems like almost all of the elite young science students you hear about are heading toward bio-related fields (and who can blame them?), so I'm glad to see that some de facto traffic and materials engineers made the cut.

(2) This week's Math Trek discusses the inherent statistical noisiness of individual performance in baseball:

"In fact, according to a new analysis by Lawrence Brown of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, predicting that a player's batting average will be the same in the second half of the season as the first half is about the worst plausible method out there."

Fair point, but I think it's a bit misleading to call baseball a noisy sport, since it's a mere pin-drop compared to the deafening statistical roar in team sports like football, where the variables are so hard to isolate and control that nobody seems to bother much. (Well, except for these guys, from the looks of it.)

In any event, though you don't need to be an Ivy League professor to realize that two weeks' worth of baseball is a minuscule sample size, this story was still a soothing balm as I contemplate the early struggles of several of my very high fantasy picks: Jose Reyes, Russell Martin, and Hunter Pence in particular. C'mon guys, TeamGuido needs you!

One non-violated pattern involving this story: my continuing professional crush on Julie Rehmeyer.

(3) I don't pay much attention to elements with atomic numbers higher than about 98, but apparently element 114 is giving some physical chemists a little trouble. If their results are correct, ununquadium seems to violate over 100 years of unflappable electro-numeric periodicity. (Man, there's no way that's the right term, but I like the sound of it.)

Why? Well, "nuclei with more protons attract electrons more strongly. Those electrons orbit faster, and according to Einstein's special theory of relativity, time for them stretches out. As a result, some of the electrons' orbits are tighter than in lighter elements, affecting that element's chemistry."

There seems to be some debate about whether such relativistic effects, which have been observed before, should be great enough to significantly alter the-element-that-would-be-Atlantisium's chemistry. This work is worth keeping an eye on, to the extent that any artificial material with a half-life on the order of seconds is worth knowing anything about. (Full disclosure: I'm being a little flippant here, but the prospect of 114-298 being stable is pretty exciting, the difficulties of cramming nine more neutrons into 114-289 notwithstanding.)

Well, unlike the subjects of these stories, I don't tend to violate a lot of patterns. Case in point: I just burned another Saturday morning doing armchair science writing despite boatloads of real work ahead of me (and, also as usual, I didn't get past the Saturday morning Science New digest in order to get to all the other interesting stuff I'd saved up all week). Ah well. Happy Saturday, everyone.

P.S., I've been getting a lot of nice feedback about this blog lately. Thanks very much for reading, everyone! I hope the rest of you are enjoying CSC as well, and I hope you'll all consider leaving comments, dropping me some email, blogging about interesting posts you find here, etc. I'd love to make this space more of a conversation; if there are ways you think I can better facilitate that goal, please let me know.