Been a while

I've been absent from the blogosphere for a while now. Meanwhile, I've had a lot on my plate. My supervisor finally woke up and realized that I'm a lazy bastard when it comes to my Ph.D. and asked ever so gently that I increase productivity. It's only fair. So, I've been very busy with work this week, trying to regain some of the ambition that I had at the beginning of the summer. There is still hope. I should be impressed that the boss was so distracted from my stagnation for so long. It helped that one of my fellow students in the group just got a paper accepted in the journal Science (which is a career maker for young scientists), and because we also got word that my own humble attempts at science had been selected as a highlight in the month's geophysical publications. Should my work make it into any popular news setting, I'll post a link here. Don't hold your breath.

In addition, H and I went a few hours west to meet up with my sister as she spends a summer as a remora to the Equestrian show circuit's shark. She's a helper for photographers who specialize in equestrian events. They happened through our state, so we went out for a short visit. Ironically enough, the grounds for the event have recently been subjected to some stream restoration work conducted by a local engineering firm. Folks were hostile about the result, which significantly reduced the functional area of the site as far as horse showing is concerned. At a glance I suggested that it looked like a Rosgen-ite project (I have done a little work in stream restoration). A little later we actually spotted an engineer doing some monitoring, so I ambled up to speak with her. Turns out that the project was designed using Dave Rosgen's methodology, which is a somewhat simplistic approach to stream restoration, but it packages easily and that's what sells. In that sense "stream restoration" is a lot like "organic": it's becoming more of a marketing label than a philosophy. Everyone wants to restore the environment and eat healthily, but effort is where we get bogged down. So, as long as we can throw money at a product that has the right label (i.e., stream restoration, or organic), then surely we are still engaging in the virtue of those activities. Unfortunately, something is lost and it has something to do with buy-low sell-high.

Anyway, it's back to the world of mathematical models for me. I have to figure out a few things so that I can return to writing this paper. I spent 3 hours yesterday (or maybe more) just deciding what (and then coding) the most efficient and defensible method of binning the data would be so that the estimate of the probablity density would be methodologically sound. It's a really basic operation, but so much depends on the resulting estimate that I was, and am, a little anxious about having it just right.