Russell's Blog

Somehow this escaped my notice. Trader Joe's is building a new store in Davis! And right across the street from me, no less. Hurry up and bring the good eats, TJ's.

To my surprise, I learned this weekend that Davis has a lively population of burrowing owls, Athene cunicularia. How cool is that?

I took some nice shots, but Jonathan has a 300mm zoom, and I don't.

They're one of the few species of owl that is active during the day, though I think these guys were only awake to watch various chattering bipeds on the hiking trail. They seem comfortable with people getting within about 30 feet of their burrows, so you can get pretty close. If you go any closer, they start to do the "I don't like you" dance. If you ignore the display and keep getting closer, I'm not sure if they would run into their burrows or have at you with their claws and beaks. Owls will mess you up, even these little guys. At least they're polite enough to warn you, so heed the warning.

One of the wonderful things about web applications is that they can be available 24-7. They can sit there and quietly do their jobs -- taking orders, billing credit cards, assigning work orders, or whatever -- even when the office is empty. That's one of the main reasons one would go to the trouble of putting a web front end on something in the first place.

So, the question of the evening is, does the UC Davis registrar know this?

Um... no.

This is a completely automated process. If you do this during the daytime, it just goes ahead and populates a table in whatever chthonic legacy database system that is swaddled in this blob of early 1990's vintage web programming. It's not like having the office open at the time actually helps.

Attention Amazon.com shoppers! It's 4:45 Central Time, and Amazon.com will be closing for the day in 15 minutes! Please complete your order before the site is disconnected for the evening. We will open again tomorrow at 8:30 A.M. Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com!

On the upside, at least it doesn't complain that my browser isn't supported. Yay.

One of the cool things about living in Davis is the amazing number of unique creative enterprises and projects people open up to the public. I suppose Davis is a comfortable place for people to try things out.

If you live in Davis, you should try Sasha's Soup Club. After a few weeks of envying the tasty lunches my labmates were enjoying, I joined the mailing list. I just received my allotment Leek and Potato soup, delivered by Sasha herself.

What can I say? It's damn good soup, exactly as described. The flavor of the potatoes and leeks both stand out nicely. Whatever else is in it, the other flavors are there to make a nice background.

I get nervous about making things with so few flavors. When I aim to make a simple soup, it will usually end up with six or seven different ingredients with strong flavors. If one of them comes out a little weak, you can still enjoy the others.

My general approach to hobbies is massive over-engineering. This is why the computer desk I built for my mother is rated for 7200 pounds (I tested it by stacking dead tractor engine blocks on top of it). I know that I'll never make a living as a chef or as a furniture builder. But if I build something, goddamnit, it's not going to fall down. So, when I make soup, or a sandwich, or a salad, I keep adding ingredients that I'm sure will taste good until something in my head says, "Yup, it'll hold."

It's greatly reassuring to me that there are people who know how to make awesome things with simple economy. I know I can make potato leek soup myself; I made some just last week. It was good, but then again, anything would be good if you loaded it up with enough garlic, onions, cheese, olive oil, peppercorns and sea salt. I wouldn't have had the confidence to make this soup.

Now, the only problem is not eating it all before I have a chance to gloat over it at lunch.

Now that I have a free moment between chopping potatoes and mashing them, I figure I should post the paper and talk I wrote summarizing my first lab rotation.

I tried to make the paper look like an PNAS article, but alas, their LaTeX template leaves much to be desired. I like how the talk turned out little better, thanks the wonderful Beamer package for LaTeX.

One of the projects I've been working on this semester is designing a teaching unit for the UC Davis introductory biology curriculum. The introductory biology courses are required for a whole bunch of different majors at UC Davis, so all three of them are offered every quarter. It's a huge effort, and thousands of students take these classes every year. This is part of a teaching seminar led by Scott Dawson (don't bother Googling for him -- you'll find the wrong guy). The idea behind Scott's seminar is to take the half-dozen or so concepts that the BIS2A, 2B and 2C students struggle with, design teaching units aimed at those topics, and then try them out on volunteers. My topic is stochastic processes, which has been great fun. The project isn't finished yet, so I'll save the details for later.

One of the other issues we've been addressing in the seminar is how scientists relate to non-scientists. This is, for obvious reasons, an essential teaching skill. Even if they hope to be scientists someday, students are not scientists. If you don't find a way to talk with them about science, then you're wasting their money and their time.

The idea that the educator is largely responsible for the success (or failure) of the student hasn't really seeped into higher education, although it's been the standard thinking in primary and secondary education for decades. Not all elementary school teachers are good at what they do, but it is generally agreed that if they are good, the results will be seen in the subsequent success of their students. In higher education, things don't really work this way.

The most often cited reason for poor instruction at the college level is that many professors consider teaching secondary to their research. While this is clearly true in many cases, teaching in higher education doesn't just suffer from playing second fiddle to research. Many, many professors (even whole departments) who take teaching seriously are nevertheless not very good at it.

There are two causes, both of which are systemic problems. First of all, people who teach at the college level are usually not trained as teachers. Many (most?) professors have no education training whatsoever. Yet, even if you have natural skills, teaching isn't something you can do effectively without at least a little theory and training.

The result is that most of the teaching in colleges is done by amateurs and autodidacts. In contrast, at the primary and secondary level, teaching has been a job for trained professionals since the turn of the last century.

The second problem, which is partly a symptom of the first, is regular old-fashioned chauvinism. It is the responsibility of the student to learn, but many professors fail to see how they fit into this. This might be acceptable at a private, endowment-supported institution, but such places are exceptions. The Harvards and Oxfords of the world are free to treat their students however they like, but public institutions are ultimately responsible to the taxpayers. The taxpayers support such institutions for two reasons; to conduct research, and to educate their kids. Sink-or-swim pedagogy is a dereliction of duty.

This is a problem that extends far beyond the classroom. I was listening to NPR on the drive down to Los Angeles, and caught a story on All Things Considered about the reception of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Some extracts :

"That fraction of people who figured that they could and should keep more or less up to date with what was happening in geology, in botany, in zoology, even in physics and mathematics is a much bigger fraction than it is today," says Steven Shapin, a Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

...

"We hear about scientific findings," says Shapin. "But the proportion that can evaluate them and follow along with them, as opposed to hearing about them, is very, very small."

Shapin says that since people can't be completely conversant with the relevant science, "They're looking for an answer to the question, 'Who can we rely on? Who's speaking the truth? Who can we trust?' "

I think the good professor is missing the point. The problem is not simply that science has gotten more complicated and technical. It is true that there is more of it, and that it moves faster. The reason I don't buy Dr. Shapin's argument is that this is not at all unique to science. Everything moves faster and is more technical now than in 1859, and people seem to cope just fine.

The problem is that scientists do not spend enough time talking with the general public. Only a small minority of scientists take the trouble to arrange their findings in a form digestible by the lay audience, as Darwin did. When they do, it is almost never cutting-edge research that fills the pages. Very few scientists go on television or the radio. The practice today is to bring research to lay the audience only when it is neatly tied up (or, the research community feels that it is, anyway). There are those who do otherwise, but there is a negative stigma to it; scientists who announce their findings with press releases instead of peer-reviewed papers are usually regarded with suspicion.

Darwin's target audience for Origin -- the typical educated Briton in 1859 -- would not have much of an advantage on the average American in 2009. A Victorian gentleman would probably have had better handwriting and more patience for trudging through elliptical turns of phrase than an American high school graduate, but I don't think they would have much of advantage when it came to comprehending an unfamiliar scientific topic. The advantage Darwin's audience had was that it had Darwin.

When a good teacher notices that a student is failing to learn something, they will look first at their own teaching methodology for the problem. The same goes for scientists; when the general public doesn't understand or care about a scientific topic, a good scientist should look first at how they are publicizing their work. If the public doesn't think your research is important, then either you aren't explaining it well enough, or maybe it actually isn't very interesting.

Looks like I got my gene to grow in E. coli!

The colonies that didn't get the plasmid I'm using to carry MXAN7396 turn blue when grown with X-gal (bromo-chloro-indolyl-galactopyranoside). The ones that got the plasmid don't.

Neat!

I finally got through the double-PCR phase of the protocol without wrecking something. Yay!

My hacked up version of the gene gene is getting snipped up with everyone's favorite restriction enzymes (BamH1 and EcoR1). Then I get to splice it into a plasmid, and electroport the plasmids into some cells, and maybe they will do something interesing.

I've been doing my first laboratory rotation in Mitch Singer's lab, and trying to learn what people are actually doing when they publish these spiffy experimental results. So far, I've mostly been wrecking things. Fun disasters of the week :

• Wrecked a DNA extraction by grabbing the wrong Pipetter and putting 300 microliters into a tube instead of 3.
• Misread an illegible label and used butanol instead of ethanol, destroyed second attempt at the aforementioned DNA extraction.
• Dropped the wrong tube in the trash, screwed up the third attempt at the aforementioned DNA extraction.
• Kept a gel on the UV bench too long while trying to chop out little cubes with a razor blade, annihilated all the DNA, and screwed up fourth attempt at aforementioned DNA extraction.
• The PCR cycler didn't close correctly, and my reaction tubes evaporated; screwing up fifth attempt at aforementioned DNA extraction. (At least this one wasn't my fault.)

I'm now spending the evening in the lab running everything over again, for the sixth time. Yays!

I definitely sticking to informatics -- that part of the rotation is going pretty well. I'm just not cut out for benchwork.

PG&E is no angel, but it deserves credit for making what looks like a good-faith effort to get California off of carbon. It's serious enough to have quit the US Chamber of Commerce to distance itself from the group's extremist views on climate change.

PG&E still owns six coal burning power plants, curiously located in Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania (presumably it uses them to swap power with other generators). It generates about 46% of its electricity from hydroelectric dams.

Rucker Creek dam, a small PG&E facility in Nevada County

One of the more interesting projects PG&E is undertaking is improving the resolution of its demand monitoring using SmartMeters. There is a lot of hype about the "Smart Grid," but basically it boils down to realtime use monitors, like these :

that are wired up to report the data somewhere. It's basically an off-the-shelf Tweet-A-Watt.

According to the PG&E web site, they are using SmartSynch meters, which use TCP/IP over some kind of wireless network. It's difficult to find information about the hardware itself, probably on account of the assorted idiots wetting their pants about people h4X0ring their refrigerators (actually, I don't know if Bill Mullins is an idiot, but his article about smart meters is depressingly typical).

Yes, it is possible for a bad person to break into your PG&E account to obtain this data.¹ But so what? Power meters are inductively coupled to the circuit they measure. They can look, but they cannot touch. IOActive, a security research firm, claims that they can break into certain smart meters and "cut off power." I suppose we are meant to construe this as "cut off power to the house," but that isn't what power meters do. That is what those huge knife switches, with the lock-out-tag-out rings, are for. I'm skeptical that a certified electrician would work on a residential circuit with a computer controlled on-off switch. I certainly wouldn't. What "cut off power" probably means is that they can shut down the microcontroller, and stop the meter from collecting or reporting data. We're left to speculate, though, because the report is confidential. I speculate that they are hyping a buffer overflow exploit to gain as much attention as possible.

Nobody is going to h4x0r your refrigerator and reprogram it to be an E. coli chemostat. If you are worried about your personal data floating around on the big bad internets, your worries are better directed at your bank and your health insurance provider. The bad guys don't care that you left your bathroom light on all night last Thursday; they just want the routing number for your savings account.

While the data isn't very valuable for nefarious purposes, it is extremely valuable in the noble (if mundane) pursuit of frugality. Here's what PG&E shows you if you've been upgraded to a smart meter :

Having the graphs is neat, but the usability of the site is poor. Fortunately, they let you download the data as CSV files, although you have to go a week at a time. It's all very 1995. Happily, Google.org is working on a real-time data browser tool called Power Meter which will make this a lot nicer. For now, a just wish I had an XML-RPC interface.

I've already learned something from this data. On the 29th and 30th, I was at the Granlibakken conference center for the UC Davis Host Microbe Interaction conference. Those days show dramatically less power use between about 22:00 and 2:00, which is when I'm usually hacking at my desktop machine. One more reason to start thinking about replacing this behemoth.

1. Actually, it's stupidly easy to gain access to someone's PG&E account if you have their account number. Just create a new web account, type in the account number, and there you go! Now you can really fuck with them by paying their bill, which is about all you can do with a PG&E account.

I was going out to the garden to wash off the cat-litter-scooper this evening, and I noticed a tiny bat clinging to my screen door. It was hanging out about knee level, and I was worried my cats would take an interest in it. So, I tried to shoo it away, but it just chirped at me and clung onto the screen harder.

I thought maybe it was hurt (or worse, sick), so I captured it in a plastic bowl to observe. It didn't do anything to evade capture, and allowed itself to be sort of gently scooped up by the edge of the bowl. It walked around a little and chirped, but didn't do try to escape.

Since it didn't seem to be interested in flying around the apartment, I transferred it to the lid of the bowl, where it allowed itself to be photographed. I put a bead of water near its nose, which it prodded a little but didn't seem to drink.

I brought it outside again to see if I could get it to fly away. I held the lid out over a soft patch of ground and lowered it quickly, it spread its wings but didn't fly. I tried a few more times, and got it to fly as far as the fence. Finally, some tapping on the fence convinced it to flap away.

Does anyone know if this is normal behavior for this kind of bat?

This summer has turned out a bit like a chocolate bar in the sun; everything started out nice and neat, but everything ended up squished into the bottom of the wrapper.

Right now, I'm working with Andrey Kislyuk on our little piece of the DARPA FunBio project. We're in the middle of a two-week code sprint, so I'll save that for a later post.

I also moved to a new apartment, and that didn't go nearly as smoothly as it could have. The guy we subleased from was in the process of buying a house, and the loan underwriter decided to yank back the money after he'd closed escrow (or was in escrow, or something). Evidently they wanted a sworn affidavit from the gardener that he was contracted to take care of the grounds. Anyway, the upshot was that instead of a nice leisurely move, he got stuck in the apartment for three weeks longer than he expected, and I was homeless for a week. Fortunately, one of the staff scientists in our lab was generous enough to let me stay at his apartment. Neil and Buzz got to learn about stairs, which they evidently adore.

Over Labor Day weekend, I went with Srijak and some of his friends from San Diego on a day hike at Lassen Volcanic National Park. I've always loved California, but it's nice to be reminded from time to time exactly why I love this place so much.

Because it's awesome.

Here are a couple of random cool things that aren't quite enough for a post on their own, so I'll stick them together.

It's been absurdly hot in Davis. Since the summer started, I've lost about nine days of productivity on account of my brain being too hot to function. By the time I get to the heavily air conditioned Genome Center building, I spend the rest of the day wanting to stick my head in a bucket of ice water.

Happily, the evenings tend to be very pleasant. And no, I'm not going to take Nate Silver up on his challenge. Good on you, Nate.

On Saturday, the Mondavi Center hosted Dengue Fever for a free concert on the quad. They are really great live! Chhom Nimol got all the little kids in the audience to come up on stage and dance. It was a great show.

My labmate Lizzy just adopted an adorable rescue puppy of unknown origin named Dweezil. He is very sweet, and already very well adapted to life with humans. He seems to love everybody, but Lizzy especially.

Meanwhile, my own rescue animals continue to puzzle me. Why does Buzz like to sleep behind my monitor? It's hot, and the cutter on the tape dispenser keeps poking him in the head and causing him to emit annoyed grumbling noises and squirm around. There are lots of comfy places he could sleep, but he likes this spot for some reason.

A guy in my apartment building just fell down the stairs right in front of my bedroom window. I put my glasses on and saw a puddle of blood slicking the concrete walkway, about ten feet from my pillow. About half the blood was coming out of his forehead, the other from a seep in his shirt where his collarbone is.

I went outside to see if he was moving. He wasn't. He didn't respond when I spoke to him. So, I did the logical thing -- I grabbed my phone and I called 911.

And it fucking crashed. So, I tried again, and it crashed again. I was in the process of ripping out the SIM card and charging up my old phone when the Davis 911 dipatcher called back. The good news is that the EMTs were fast. As soon as the dispatcher hung up, I stepped out to the street to wait for them, and I could already see the lights coming up the street.

So, listen here Google, T-Mobile and HTC: FUCK YOU. Fix your shit.

After it started to cool down yesterday, I went for a bike ride around the research farms, and I saw what I thought was a seam in the bike path. It wasn't until I was almost on top of it that I noticed that it was the shadow of a snake crossing the path! I ran over the poor guy before I could hit the breakes.

Fortunately, the snake survived, and went slithering into his hidey hole in the roots of one of the huge trees that line the bike path. I used a stick to touch the end of his tail to make sure his spine wasn't broken, and he reacted in about the way you would expect a not-run-over snake to react.

Sorry this isn't a very good picture. Since T-Mobile pushed out the Android Cupcake upgrade, my phone has been ridiculously, pathetically slow. It took almost a minute and a half to get the camera application open and snap a picture. By that time, the snake had spent 30 seconds slithering around on the bike path checking itself out (which would have been an awesome shot), and then gone about 20 feet into the grass. Boo Android! Fix your shit!

The snake was about four feet long and about the width of two fingers. The head was sort of bullet-shaped, as opposed to shovel-shaped, so it's probably not a viper. My guess is garter snake.

My article on bike safety is in print in the Davis Enterprise! I was invited to write this column as a follow up to my Davis Crash Map article and Anna's accident in 2007.

It's not up on their web site yet. I'll update with a link one they post it.

:: update ::

Here is the text of the article :

The Davis Enterprise: June 19, 2009
Davis Bicycles! column #20
Title: When road design gets personal Author: Russell Neches

Two years ago my little sister was riding her bicycle to a friend’s house. A woman was diving home from work. They met when the car hit Anna at 30 mph.

Before I go further, Anna is OK.

The weeks following the accident were hard. Aphasia, hematoma, and dental prosthesis became a regular part of family conversation. It was a month before we were sure she would get better.

Anna lives in Norman, Oklahoma. Norman is a lot like Davis; it’s roughly the same size, population and distance from the state capital. Norman hosts a big university and encourages bicycling.

After the accident, I desperately wanted someone to take responsibility. At first, I blamed Anna for not being more careful. Then I read the police report, and blamed the driver. But when I visited Norman and stood by the splashes of dried blood on the asphalt, I found I couldn’t blame either of them. The blame belonged to the road itself.

In sharp contrast to Davis, Norman has some of the sloppiest road design in America. The road where the accident happened has no curb, no sidewalk, no lane markings, no lights, and no center divider. The street is a smear of asphalt that informally fades into gravel and scrubby grass on its way to becoming front yard. This wasn’t some lonely country road. It happened downtown, right next to the University of Oklahoma. The equivalent spot in Davis might be about Seventh and E Streets. Until Anna’s face slammed into the windshield, the driver had no way of knowing for sure that she was driving on the wrong side of the road.

Davis does a pretty good job when it comes to road design. Even out amongst the farms, most of the roads have reflectorized lines to mark the center and shoulders. This isn’t because paint is cheaper in California. It’s because public officials have found that the lines help people be safer drivers.

With Anna’s final round of reconstructive surgery still in the works, I hope I can be forgiven for being preoccupied with bicycle safety. I’m a scientist. When scientists get worried, we go back to the data. Mapping the last couple of years of Davis accident reports indicates that the biggest problem spot in our town is the much-debated Fifth Street corridor.

It has been proposed to transform the stretch of Fifth Street north of downtown from a higher-speed four-lane road with frequent stops into a lower-speed two-lane road with center turn pockets. The design would look somewhat like B Street does now. I was surprised to learn that the two roads carry about the same amount of traffic.

Not everyone likes the idea, and some warn that slowing traffic may result in congestion. This must be taken seriously, and so detailed computer models have been constructed. The models show that the proposed design would actually increase throughput and reduce congestion somewhat.

This counterintuitive result is something with which I have personal experience. I grew up in Los Angeles, the poster city for congestion. It got that way because people tried to solve congestion problems by adding lanes. What we got for our billions of dollars was even worse congestion. LA has more acreage under roads than under destinations, and yet it is still asphyxiated.

Roads are ancient technology. Roman engineers would find California’s freeways impressive, but would learn little from them. But even ancient technology can be improved. We didn’t get from swinging stone axes to landing robots on Mars by refusing to try new things. Lane reduction has been tried in other cities, with great results for safety and efficiency.

The proposed Fifth Street design sounds like something worth trying. It will make Davis a safer, more efficient place walk, bike and drive. Repainting and installing different signals is part of the normal process of maintaining and improving roads. The proposal would simply guide this process. If it doesn’t work, the city has more paint. My family learned the hard way just how important lines of paint really are.

I’ve made an interactive map at vort.org/media/data/crashes.html displaying the last couple of years of Davis accident data. I hope it will inspire you think about how our roads are designed, how those designs succeed, and how they can be improved.

— Russell Neches is a microbiology graduate student at UC Davis. He has commuted to school and work through Los Angeles, New York and Boston on various vehicles including bikes, cars, trains, subways and on foot.

:: update 2 ::

Here is the direct link to the article on the Davis Enterprise website : http://www.davisenterprise.com/story.php?id=621.3

Now that she's all graduated and stuff, Mimi came out to Davis for my birthday this week. She took me to this place in Napa called, of all things, Ubuntu. Not only is it a nice word in Zulu, but it's also a Linux distribution, a restaurant and a yoga studio. Anyway, they were the runner up for best new restaurant of 2008 in the New York Times Food & Wine section.

It was delicious, but kind of difficult to describe. Evidently, the chef walks out into his garden each morning, peers at the ripening ingreedients, and invents the day's menu based on what's ready to eat. Neat!

Anyway, Mimi is here in Davis until Friday. We're having a great time biking around town and doing Davis-y things.

I've been tinkering with a little data visualization applet for looking at bicycle crash data in Davis, and I thought this map might be interesting to people. This is a image was generated with Google Maps and a heatmap overlay generated with a gheat tile server.

This is for 168 bicycle accidents that happened between 2004 and 2006. I have a lot more data, but 95% of the work in this little project involves parsing and renormalizing it. Evidently, police reports are not written with data processing in mind! I suppose that makes perfect sense. An officer at the scene of an accident probably has things on her mind besides generating a nice, easy to parse data point for future analysis. The priority seems to be completeness, rather than consistency. My parsing code, for example, has to be able to correctly detect and calculate distances measured in units of "feeet".

I'll release the applet here once I make an interface for it (and get the rest of the data imported). Stay tuned.

I'm not sure if I'm glad or sorry to have missed this conversation.

I was biking home today, and I decided to take a detour to enjoy the warm evening (and to avoid the not enjoyable warm apartment). About half way around the Davis Bike Loop, I remembered that I wanted to try out My Tracks. Here's the result : Neat!

After wandering off the Bike Loop a bit, I decided to head home. I was biking down Russell Blvd., and I witnessed a very scary car accident. The accident happened where I stopped recording the track, at the red marker. A guy in a cherried-out lifted F-150 was sitting at the traffic light (that's the point where I turned around). When the light turned green, he floored it. According to the other witnesses, he was racing with someone, or trying to catch someone who had cut him off. I couldn't see the other car because it was behind his gigantic stupid truck.

What I did see, though, was that he accelerated continuously until he reached the next intersection (the red marker), where he had a head-on collision with a girl in a 1990's Honda Civic trying to make a left turn. His engine was deafeningly loud even a block away, and I heard it roaring and down-shifting right up until the crash.

Looking at the damage to her car, it looked like he basically ran it over. The lift kit on the truck put his undercarriage about level with her roof, and there were even little ladders installed to climb up to the doors. After he ran over the Civic, he swerved around a bit, jumped the median, sideswiped a small SUV in the oncoming traffic, spun 180 degrees, and snapped his axle. When the axle snapped, I heard his engine redline for half a second and then cut.

Happily, nobody was hurt. The girl in the Civic was pretty much petrified, though. She was convinced that the accident was her fault because she didn't get out of the way.

I told her this was nonsense; the truck was going more than double the speed limit, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have his lights on (it was dusk, but not completely dark yet). She asked me about five times, "How much do you think it will cost to fix?" I told her, "Cost you? Nothing. He was committing maybe a dozen moving violations, and probably racing someone. His insurance company will probably be so happy not to have to pay medical bills that they will buy you a whole new car."

Maybe she could have been a little swifter completing her turn, but it's a busy street and there is a lot of pedestrian and bicycle traffic (it parallels a bike path). Making a quick turn is probably not a good idea. Or, maybe she could have waited until this asshole passed, but, as I pointed out, he was going maybe 50 or 60 in a 30 zone, and accelerating. She timed her turn right for reasonable traffic flow, but didn't account for total maniacs among the oncoming traffic. It would have been difficult to judge when he would reach the intersection she was turning through.

Oi!

As it turns out, Davis has been thinking about redesigning this stretch of Russell Blvd. for several years. If you look at the proposed design, it would have made this accident impossible or unlikely. You can't race on a one lane road, and a landscaped medium would have prevented the second collision.

A little while ago, I was riding home on my wonderful Brompton bicycle, and the chain tensioner suddenly disengaged. That had never happened before, and I discovered that the gear on the chain tensioner had completely smashed to bits. Here's what it looked like :

After puzzling about it for a while, I think I understand what happened. I use the same chain oil on my Brompton that I use on my racing bike. The "oil" is actually a mixture of a heavy lubricant in a volatile solvent. The solvent evaporates after coating the chain, and dissolves whatever gunk has accumulated. I think the solvent damaged the plastic. I've seen this happen with some plastics when they come into contact with gasoline. The gasoline dissolves the plasticizing agents, and leaves behind an open matrix of molecules, like a very, very fine sponge. The open matrix has a huge surface area and oxidizes rapidly. Your nice flexible plastic turns into something hard and crumbly, like a stale cookie.

That's what I think happened here. The remaining bits of plastic are still relatively flexible, but the bits that broke off have turned into a powdery mess.

The guy who sold me my bike offered to let me buy an idler wheel off of one of the bikes in his stock, but I didn't want another plastic gear. Here is what I built :

I bought a standard anodized aluminum derailleur gear from a local bike shop, and attached it to the Brompton chain tensioner arm with a few pennies worth of standard hardware. The new idler wheel (gear? cog?) slides along a little stainless steel tube I picked up at the hardware store and cut to length. This gives it enough play to allow for easy shifting. The tube has just the right tolerance to allow the gear to spin very easily, but not wobble.

Here's the exploded view :

From top to bottom, the parts are :

• regular old bolt
• two washers
• stainless tube
• gear
• another washer
• lock washer
• nut

The gear is part of a Shift Biscuits pully set (though probably any pully set would work), and the steel tube is 7.94mm x 7.4mm (stock No. 7117) cut to length with a hacksaw (this took a while). The rest of the hardware is standard hardware store stuff.

I had to saw off the plastic axle tube on the chain tensioner arm because it would have prevented the idler wheel from sliding into the right position for the outer gear. I chose a bolt with a hex-head that fit snugly into the socket on the tensioner arm (similar to the bolts on the toggles for locking the frame in place). Once the nut is tightened against the lock washer, the axle is extremely rigid. The gear slips across the tube with almost zero play.

The shifting action is actually much smoother than it was with the plastic gear, and the bike seems to make a little less noise than I remember (that could be my imagination).

Yay! I've got my bike back, and without another dorky plastic gear, too. Neat!

I was biking to the gym yesterday, and it occured to me that since it was so beautiful outside, I may as well just keep biking. So, instead of sitting on the stationary bike, I did a three and a half hour ride down some random county road. It was awesome, even with my funny little commuter bike.

Along the way I passed this pathway planted with olive trees through the middle of one of the UC Davis research farms.

Note to self: Plant more olive trees.

This quarter, I'm taking :

• Mathematical Methods : Laplace transforms, Fourier transforms, Greens functions, and their applications to partial differential equations.
• Quantum Mechanics: Again. For the heck of it.
• Numerical Methods: Analysis of the performance, stability and error propagation of numerical algorithms in finite precision systems.

So far, it's way more fun than last quarter. Still, I'm disappointed that the molecular structures course I wanted to take conflicts with numerical methods. Hopefully I can take it next quarter.

The preliminary exam for mathematical methods is in the middle of finals week at the end of this quarter. That is going to suck.

A lot of people fought long and hard to give me the right to a secret ballot. This time around, though, I'm happy to show it to anyone who cares to look.

I like this ballot system much better than the InkaVote thing they have in LA, and much better than any kind of computerized bullshit. I spent four years using computers to design fusion reactors, but I sure as hell don't trust them with an election. Pen and paper, thanks.

When it rains, it pours! I've been hanging around all summer wondering what to do with myself, and now suddenly there is a huge explosion of activity. After a four day expedition to Davis to sign paperwork at Graduate Studies, register for classes, look for a job, look for an apartment, and get a sense of what it will be like to live here, I drove back to Los Angeles for my cousin Nathalie's wedding (Sunday) and my great aunt's 88th birthday (Monday). Both were beautiful. Then I packed my car and drove back to Davis this afternoon.

Tomorrow, I have a job interview and tour for an on-campus job working in one of the Department of Entomology greenhouses. Not quite as good as a TA position, but it would pay for rent and get me outside and moving around on a regular basis.

I still haven't found a place to live yet, but a very nice fellow from my department is letting me crash on his living room floor until I do. Classes were supposed to start Thursday, but evidently the professor for that course isn't here yet.