Protest Resources–Oust Governor Walker

 

Here are some great resources for everyone to use:

1. You can call the Governor’s office at 608-266-1212. It will say the voice message box is full. Just keep on the line as long as you can and it should go to a live person. Otherwise, keep trying to call back as you have time.
   
2. You can call 1-877-753-5578 to get in touch with your state representatives. Many message boxes are also full here, but keep trying!
   
3. NotMyWisconsin is largely a way to sign up for action alerts. scottwalkerwatch.com is another good resource, though it seems to be down right now.
   
4. There are many Facebook groups, 540,000 To See Scott Walker out of WI, January 2012 and Recall of Governor Scott Walker seem to be good ones.
   
5. My.Madison is a great place to get current local news about the situation.
   
6. As an alternative to calling (though calling is what we need right now), you can find out who your state legislators are and their contact, including email will be listed. Please write and keep writing!
   
7. Many hashtags are floating around out there for Twitter. Mine is #OustGovWalker, others include #NotMyWI, #WIUnion, #SolidarityWI, and #KillTheBill

Solidarity Forever.

Tweet

Oust Governor Scott Walker

 

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." –Mario Savio¹

Solidarity to all those protesting Dictator Walker. We can't take 4 more years of his unilateral actions against the people of his state.

In 1911, Wisconsin became the very first state to enact workers compensation protections. In 1932 Wisconsin was the first state to enact unemployment compensation. And in 1959, Wisconsin was one of the first to enact a collective bargaining law for public employees.²

“Seven killed were on May 5, 1886 by state militia who fired into a crowd of 1,500 workers marching peacefully on behalf of the eight-hour day toward the Bay View Rolling Mills on Milwaukee’s lakefront.”³

Scott Walker has threatened the peaceful protests against his policies with the Wisconsin National Guard. This would be the first time the National Guard would be ordered against the citizens of this nation since 1968.

Scott Walker is a dictator. He enacts sweeping legislation from the executive branch, in violation of his constitutional mandate. When the people cry out against him, he threatens them with military reprisal.

This must end. We cannot lie down and let Scott Walker destroy everything the people of this state have worked for for the last hundred years.

I call upon the people of this state to sign a Recall Petition to oust Governor Scott Walker. Within 60 days of registering such a petition, we would need to gather at least 533,287 signatures.⁴ I think there’s about 175,000 state and public workers who would be with me.

Unfortunately, we must wait until one year after he took office. In January 2012 I trust that such a petition will be circulated.

In the mean time, do what you can to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the levers.”

And you must write letters, as many as you can, to your state representatives and to the governor’s office stating your views. Email is okay, but I would much rather flood the mail with letters of outrage against this dictator. On Twitter I am using the tag #OustGovWalker, and I encourage everyone to use it as well.

Solidarity Forever.

Tweet

---

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio Retrieved 2011-02-16.
² http://www.wisconsinlaborhistory.org/?page_id=34 Retrieved 2011-02-16.
³ ibid.
⁴ http://elections.state.wi.us/docview.asp?docid=11827&locid=47 Retrieved 2011-02-16.

Top Ten Albums – January 2011

 

A few months ago I started keeping a mental list of what my favorite albums of all time are. It's a list based on my opinion at the time and also weighted by how often I am listening to that album. It's changed a fair amount over the last few months, and I've thought about how it would be fun to track these trends, especially looking back in the future.

So, both to share what I'm listening to and for my personal historical record, I am starting a new 'feature' on this blog, my top ten albums. Starting with a new year seems like a clean way to go, and installments will be monthly.

Here we go:

1. A Thousand Suns – Linkin Park
2. This Is War – 30 Seconds to Mars
3. Sing the Sorrow – AFI
4. Fallen – Evanescence
5. Alchemy Index, Vols. III & IV: Air & Earth – Thrice
6. Siren Song of the Counter Culture – Rise Against
7. Infinity on High – Fall Out Boy
8. 21st Century Breakdown – Green Day
9. American Idiot – Green Day
10. How to Start a Fire – Further Seems Forever

There were some others in the running for the list, but I had to make my decisions. After #5 it became a little more difficult, since I spend a vast amount of time listening to the top albums on the list.

The Math of Dream Time in "Inception"

I'm a big fan of Christopher Nolan's newest film "Inception."


I am also a big fan of math. I know that makes me a nerd. (When I was home for Christmas, my family was discussing complicated gift-giving timetables, and getting confused. So I drew a Venn Diagram where the universe was 'my family,' and gift-giving times were shown as color-coded functions describing the relationships between various parts of the family. I thought it cleared everything up nicely, although my family did not entirely agree.)


So, I decided, with the help of a partner, to try to figure out the Real Time to Dream Time conversion from the movie. I figured at first it would be a nice linear function, but alas, no.


Throwing out the off-the-cuff estimations that are made at various points in the movie, I considered my reliable data points to be:

Real Time	1st Dream	2nd Dream	3rd Dream
5	60	?	?
600	10080	259200	5256000

This comes from two scenes. In one, they are teaching Ariadne about the dream world, and they say "Five minutes in the real world gives you one hour in the dream world."


The second comes from when they are planning for the flight. They say that the flight is 10 hours, which gives them 1 week in the first dream, 6 months in the second dream, and 10 years in the third dream.


I have converted everything to minutes as our base unit. Given this information, we plotted the second (more complete) set into a curve to predict the final piece of that set, the time in Limbo. We got y = 26.276e^3.0481x  with an R² value of 0.9993.
This gives us a Limbo time value for that set at 109250719, or approximately 39,000 years.


The two data sets don't exactly work together, though. Any equation you find to approximate the relationship does not correctly predict our other given case. This is partly because we are working in 3 dimensions, so we need to define some variables:

• x is the dream level, given by 0 for real time, 1 for first dream, etc.
• z is the amount of real time, and
• y is the amount of dream time.

Then we can say that f(x,z) is the amount of dream time, and we have 

f(x, 600) = 26.276e^3.0481x.

We tried very many ways to fit our two data sets together, but we were not finding any good correlations. We are especially interested in the fact that they seem to be able to do the math quickly (or at least estimate quickly) in the movie, and we had not been able to find an elegant equation.

Eventually, we started to think about it another way. What if we graph the amount of real time passed for each minute in dream time, based on the dream level? This gives us a curve approaching zero on the y-axis.

We used our given information to graph this:

Dream Level	Real Time	Dream Time
0	1	1
1	1	600/10080
2	1	600/259200
3	1	600/5256000

Which gave us this relationship: a = 1.0835e^-3.048x

where a is the real time passed for each minute of dream time at dream level x.

I realized that a = z/y, since a is essentially the z per 1y.

So, with some algebra we come up with 

f(x,z) = z/(1.0835e^-3.048x)

Now, this is far from perfect, and as an example, in my table below I have a "Real Time" column, which is the real time as predicted by our function. You can see that the accuracy of the real time prediction goes down as real time increases, but that the prediction of dream time values gets more accurate as we approach our base case of 600 minutes real time. Also, "Real Time" is rounded to two decimal places, and the dream time minutes are rounded to the whole number.

You can see, though, that we are still off from our given values:





I am very interested in whether or not someone can come up with a better approximation than ours, and I'd love to see it.


Probably will be more on this to come.

Veggie Stew Recipe

To celebrate having a new stove and dishwasher, marking the first time we could cook at home for about 2 months, I made some stew. Some of my friends know of this stew. This time, especially after some persuading from others, I have decided to write down a recipe. So here it is. 


The measurements may be a little rough, but stew is pretty lenient. Also, it is worth noting that this is my super-easy "semi-home-made" version of this. When I'm feeling up to it, I'll cut up and otherwise prepare a whole bucket o' fresh veggies. However, this is almost as good at about 1/10th the effort.


1 14.5oz can of vegetable broth
1 14.5oz can of sweet corn
1 14.5oz can of peas
1 14.5oz can of sliced carrots
1 14.5oz can of garbanzo beans (chickpeas)
1/2 or 1 can of pinto beans
2 14.5oz cans of 'new/baby' potatoes
1 14.5oz can of diced tomatoes
1 large (30oz?) can of tomato sauce
1 cup frozen (or fresh) mukimame (shelled edamame)
1/2 cup uncooked 'minute' brown rice
1 cup frozen diced onion OR 1 medium white onion
1 tbsp diced garlic (2 large cloves)
1 tsp Mirin
1 dash of 'Italian seasoning'
2 tsp of chili powder
2 tsp or more of cayenne pepper, to taste
1 tsp or more ground black pepper, to taste


*Note: get the reduced salt or no salt canned vegetables whenever possible. Also to avoid: the cheapest can. It's never worth it. Get your green giant or del monte or whatever and enjoy it. You can spare the extra $1.50 total.

1. Heat a large stockpot on a med-high burner. Once it's warmed up, add about a tablespoon of whatever lubrication you prefer. All I had on hand at the time was seasoned wok oil, which worked great. Olive oil would work great too.
2. Add the onion, sauté until translucent. Add the garlic as the onions are just starting to turn. You don't want to burn the garlic. 
3. At around the same time as the garlic, add your mukimame. If you are using fresh or thawed, add them a little later. If you're confused about this whole mukimame/edamame thing: soybeans. Soybeans out of the shell. That's what I'm talking about.
4. You want the mukimame to get just a little bit of brown to some of them. This helps make them a little chewy later, which is delicious. The onions can be a little brown in places, but generally translucent.
5. Before anything starts to burn (or if it does), add the whole can of veggie broth and stir it up to get any goodies off the bottom of the pot. (Deglazing, sort of)
6. At this point, add the corn, peas, carrots, garbanzo beans, pinto beans, and potatoes. Make sure to drain each can first. Some bean juice is not just okay but good. For the potatoes, you'll need to cut out any eyes that escaped the machines and slice the potatoes into roughly bite-sized chunks before you add them. One benefit of using canned potatoes is that you can leave larger chunks and they will still cook through, as they are already par-cooked.
7. Add the spices and the Mirin. Stir thoroughly.
8. Bring to a low boil, then cover and reduce temperature to simmer. Simmer for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally. 
9. Add the rice. Stir. I used about 5 'small handfuls' of rice, so I'm estimating 1/2 to 1 cup, uncooked. Use 'minute' rice.
10. Add the diced tomatoes and tomato sauce. Stir thoroughly.
11. Bring back to a simmer. Cover and simmer for 50 minutes, stirring occasionally.
12. Enjoy!

Wildlife Photography

Wildlife and nature photography is something I'm interested in, in an amateur fashion. I got a zoom lens (75-300mm) recently and hadn't really used it yet. I started to take a walk in the park the other day and noticed the copious amounts of cool birds in the marsh, so I ran back home, grabbed my camera and gear, and went back.


Now, this was my first real use of my new lens, and I'm still learning the basics of photography to begin with. Also, most of my good pictures so far have been of .. flowers. Because they're pretty, and they don't move too much.


Birds are also pretty, but damn do they move around.


You know all those sayings about how mistakes are really lessons? I learned a lot of lessons. Took a lot of pictures. Only a few of them are good. But I learned a lot of lessons.


Lessons Learned: Day 1

• It's true that a zoom lens is hard to keep steady for your picture. A tripod, however, is not an option. I learned this over and over again when things happened and I couldn't get my camera around in time. Folding up some of the legs to make it a monopod was great, I wish I had been doing that from the beginning.
• A zoom lens has a really narrow focus field. And so, you should always take at least 3 pictures of a great subject, and adjust the focus a little each time (a little too near, what you think is right, and a little too far). That way you increase your chances of one being right.
  
• It's fairly easy to get close to geese (although they slowly swim away from you), but it's really hard to get close to this guy:
  
  
  
• I learned how to recognize (via the sounds they are making) that a group of geese is about to take off from the water. This is crucial if you want to be ready to take a picture of them taking off.
  
• I also learned to recognize the call of a sandhill crane. This happened when three of them flew literally ten feet above my head and I was not ready for them. Perfect shot missed.
  
• It pays to hide. Perhaps I need to invest in some more camouflaged, or at least earth-toned, clothing.
  
• Try not to get fuzzy vegetation in the foreground. You may be zoomed all the way to 300, but you still need to know what's right in front of you. You can only crop out so much.
  
• Ultimately, I'll need an even bigger zoom lens.
  
• A zoom lens is not for taking landscapes with. You cannot get a big enough focal plane.

See all my pictures from day one here.

Lessons Learned: Day 2

So, having learned many things (and more than I listed) on the first day, I returned again this morning in better light and better conditions.

• Go on a weekday morning. Nobody else is in the park to scare the animals, the lighting is better, and most of the birds are busy eating, so they don't care as much if you're there.
  
• Stalk slowly. Basically, you are playing a game of red-light-green-light. If they look away, feel free to run to a new spot, quietly. You will be rewarded:
  
  
  
• Walk softly. I was clomping my way along to the next spot I was going to take photos from when I saw three turtles slip into the water after I startled them. I could have had some great photographs of them if I had been walking more quietly and paying more attention to my surroundings.
  
• When sneaking up on an animal, don't keep yourself below the brush line and then suddenly appear right next to it. I got close, but if anyone was in the park this morning and wondered why about a hundred birds suddenly took off from the shoreline and went out to the middle of the lake: that was my fault.
  
• Sandhill cranes really don't want to be photographed.
  
• I need a bird identification book. And some binoculars.

Pictures from day two.

I had a lot of fun, and I'm going to keep trying. I'll probably need to pick up some more supplies and check out some books from the library for pointers. If I get some really good shots, or learn some really good lessons, I'll let you know here.

The Car Saga

Chapter 1: The tale of how the Corolla came to be


So, about 2 years ago I bought my first car. It was during the super gas price days, when it regularly hit $4 a gallon, so finding an economy car was very difficult. I ended up with my swank 1999 Toyota Corolla, which was exactly what I was looking for, so I overlooked some of the minor concerns we had with it. (It has paint issues, it shook on the highway, dent in the hood, looks like it was treated unkindly.) Bought it for about $4500, after we talked them down a grand. The day after I bought the car and happily drove it back to Madison, the check engine light came on. The dealership was good enough to take it back, check it out, and fix whatever it was for free, as I had literally just bought it. It turned out to be a faulty sensor, no big deal. I should have taken it as an omen, though.