paperclippy

Does anyone else hear a striking similarity between "Listen To Your Heart" by Roxette and "What About Love" by Heart? I guess they really did listen to their Heart when they wrote that song.

How did I end up reading two werewolf books in a row? Weird. It's not exactly a genre I actively seek out.

( Benighted by Kit Whitfield )

Currently reading: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

I wish LJ had a search feature. Meaning, a search feature that will search all my entries, including friends-only and private, and which I can use without allowing other search engines to index my journal. All I want to know is when I read particular books and whether I wrote reviews of them, but I only know about the ones I read since I started tagging entries.

I'm working at home today, observing Carter in his native habitat. His day goes something like this:

6:00 - Wake up, stretch, shake. Lick dad's hand. Lick mom's hand. Back to sleep.
6:40 - Follow dad downstairs, go outside. Pee, perimiter check, sniff to see what's been going on.
6:50 - Breakfast.
7:00 - Back upstairs to lay outside the bedroom until mom gets out of the shower.
7:15 - Downstairs for a walk with dad.
7:35 - Go outside, poop. Perimiter check.
7:40 - Get petted, lay around living room until mom and dad go to work.
8:00 - Back to sleep on downstairs dog bed (or couch, if mom and dad forget to take precautions).
9:40 - Wake up, stretch, shake. Drink some water. Sleep in sunny spot by back window.
11:15 - Wake up, stretch, shake. Go sit by library window and observe the outside world. Bark at anyone who walks by.
12:00 - Back to sunny spot for a nap.
12:30 - Back to window to keep an eye on things. Bark at anyone who walks by.
2:00 - If sunny spot is still sunny, sleep in sunny spot. Otherwise, sleep on downstairs dog bed.
3:30 - Back to window to keep an eye on things. Bark at anyone who walks by.
4:30 - Sleep on downstairs dog bed.
5:30 - Mom and dad come home! Wag tail like a maniac and run around in circles. Get petted.
5:40 - Go outside, pee, perimiter check. Go for a walk!
6:00 - Hang around the kitchen while mom makes dinner. Whine for food.
6:30 - Eat dinner!
6:40 - Go outside, poop, perimiter check. Bark at neighbors.
6:50 - Sleep at foot of couch while mom and dad eat dinner and watch tv. Get petted.
8:00 - Play with rope or ball. Chew on rope for a while.
8:40 - Sleep near couch, get petted.
9:30 - Check front of house windows. Bark at anyone who passes by.
9:45 - Sleep on downstairs dog bed.
10:00 - Bedtime! Race upstairs, chew Nylabone.
10:30 - Finish chewing Nylabone, go to sleep on upstairs dog bed. Repeat from beginning again.

Obviously there are slight deviations. At the moment he's sitting by the library window keeping an eye on things. What a dog! Plus this afternoon I'm taking him to the vet because he hurt one of his toenails.

Ad across the top of my gmail: "Pigs shouldn't have lipstick unless they've been kissed. Help pigs now!" (From PETA, but I like the implication that we should all go out and kiss a lot of pigs.)

I think it's hilarious that in the midst of a string of really great songs, Pandora decides to play me "The Macarena." *facepalm*

Recent Pandora finds:

• Matro Station - Shake It
  
• Shock Stars - Butterfly
  
• Tim Seely - Funeral Music
  
• Jonezetta - Get Ready (Hot Machete) (It's very catchy, but the lyrics are nonsense. It's a dance anthem, and the chorus just goes, "Get ready, get ready like a hot machete, get ready, get ready like a hot machete!")
  
• not a recent find, but 30 Seconds to Mars - From Yesterday
  
• Asian Kung-Fu Generation - Last Scene
  
• The Postal Service - Clark Gable
  

From a commenter on this metafilter thread (thanks quigonejinn), emphasis mine.

I wish we could separate religious marriage from legal unions. Give people all the rights and benefits of marriage, but make the religious aspect something akin to baptism or confirmation: a ritual that has no ramifications outside that religion. Then people could discriminate against whomever they wanted in their place of worship but would have to act like fucking grown-ups the other six days of the week.

So everyone was excited to see Ohio and some other states go blue . . . but why is nobody excited about Indiana??? (OK, I know, we have only 11 electoral votes, but still.) Indiana voted democrat for the first time in 44 years. Woohoo!

(Still at 99% reporting, and Obama only ahead by about 30,000, but it's been called everywhere.)

I'm still watching the numbers come in on prop 8 for California, fingers crossed.

I'm trying to understand a section of a paper. They're talking about the signal generated by a photomultiplier tube when photons from fluorescence are coming into it. The sentence says, "Since the number of photo-electrons ultimately captured by the PMT is finite, the signal quantitation is stochastic with a variance governed by the Poisson distribution."

• Why does the fact that the number of photo-electrons is finite affect anything?
  
• I forgot what stochastic means, please enlighten me.
  
• Does "signal quantitation" mean the number of distinct waveforms coming out of the PMT?
  
• Why is it governed by the Poisson distribution?
  

The next sentence says, "The square root of the number of captured photo-electrons is approximately the standard deviation of the error distribution." Is this because it is Poisson?

Also, explain the following sentences to me please: "Q is a measurement of efficiency and has units of number of photo-electrons per unit fluorescence intensity. The lower the Q value, the higher the amount of relative counting error associated with the signal."

I will admit that the primary reason I don't understand this is that I slacked off in prob/stat classes and I also never really learned how a PMT works. Unfortunately now it's important for me to understand what's going on!