So I took some of my birthday money, bought a new domain name, and set up a new blog. It was an experiment, just to see. After a month-and-a-half, I feel like it’s been pretty successful. I’m excited about writing for the new blog, and, since it has a focus, I’ve been able to promote it a little bit. I’m still trying to find the right voice for it, but that’s part of the fun.

Check it out: Ultratech Memes.

As a result, this blog will suffer. I would like to keep posting here, if on a much less frequent basis. We’ll just have to see whatI have for.

This movie is a classic for good reason and highly recommended if you like musicals. I could easily watch it again.

Organic fruits and vegetables are farmed with botanical or primarily nonsynthetic pest controls quickly broken down by sunlight and oxygen, instead of long-lasting synthetic chemicals. Organic produce sometimes carries chemical residues because of pesticides that are now pervasive in groundwater and rain, but their chemical load is much lower.

According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., eating the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables exposes you to about 20 pesticides a day on average. If you eat the 12 least contaminated, you’re exposed to about two pesticides a day.

Even eating the least contaminated food exposes you to, on average, multiple pesticides per day because the stuff is as much a part of groundwater and rain as, well, the water itself. Is that not shocking? This article sort of tosses it out there like they’re saying the sky is blue. But it’s why advocate organic foods even if the direct health impact over regular foods to me is minimal: it’s just getter for the Earth and for everyone in general.

So what can you count on when you buy organic? No animals, except dairy cows prior to being moved to organic farms, can be given antibiotics, growth hormones, or feed made from animal byproducts, which can transmit mad cow disease. No genetic modification or irradiation is permitted, nor is fertilizer made with sewage sludge or synthetic ingredients, all of which are allowed in most conventional food production.

Sounds yummy, doesn’t it? Sewage sludge and synthetic fertilizers speak for themselves, and I don’t have a problem with growth hormones and genetic modification. The hidden danger here is antibiotics, which are generally given in feed. The antibiotics become part of the waste and runoff from livestock farms and have also become pervasive in groundwater. When that happens, it breeds wild bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. Eventually, you end up with a superbug.

The other band that I’m in love with at the moment is White Rabbits. I would describe them as sounding kinda like Interpol. Apparently they have two drummers, which is pretty cool. I have some tracks, including live ones, I got somewhere, but Hype Machine is being a bitch right now so I can’t find the links. White Rabbits does have free MP3s on their MySpace, so you can check them out that way.

I bring this up in response to a recent editorial in Wired, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” in which Clive Thompson talks about our increasing reliance on computers to store key facts. He cites a study that found a number of young people didn’t know their own phone number and instead had to look it up on their phones. I usually know my own number, but I was dating Caroline for years before I’d memorized hers. Moreover, I love looking stuff up on Wikipedia or IMDB. But Thompson raises a good question: “Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?”

I don’t know that I can answer that. Thompson himself surmises, “Maybe there’s just as much value in the ability to marinate in the seemingly trivial.” That’s probably true, but I think it’s more important to learn how to think and to truly understand rather than simply acquire a large set of facts.

I think that what we really learn in school—at least after grammar school—is how to think. Physics is my favorite example because that’s the first time I was really cognizant of what I was learning. Memorizing formulae and constants is worthless if you can’t calculate the acceleration of a block down a slope (given the appropriate values) at test time. Genetics is the same. I used to tell my students at the beginning of the semester that they weren’t learning genetics, they were learning how to think about genetics and solve genetics problems, and the only way to do that was to do a lot of genetics problems.

With our collective outboard brain, it’s easy to look up facts, but without a true understanding, the facts themselves are pretty useless. For example, I could probably read about string theory on WIkipedia all day long, but I doubt it would make a lot of sense to me.  I don’t have a very good grasp of quantum mechanics, gravity, and relativity, and just throwing a bunch of facts at me is not a very good way to learn. Similarly, I could tell you about cyclodextrin, but without an understanding of and background in biochemistry and pharmacodynamics, it’s not going to do you a whole lot of good.

Personally, I’m happy to offload as much processing to computers as I can. They’re clearly superior to me at many things: storing facts, sending reminders, and performing highly repetitive tasks.  That leaves me more time and energy to focus on solving problems, being creative, making connections between facts, and trying to truly understand the things that interest me.

For whatever reason, the subtitles turned themselves on about five minutes into the movie, and that was a good thing. I could understand all the soft-spoken parts (there are a lot) as well as the background vocals (there are a lot of disembodied announcer, too), which helped me to understand a lot more about what was going on in terms of both the plot and the future society in general.

Taken solely on its own merits, THX1138 would be a forgotten film. It’s preserved solely by another small film made by the same director a few years later. Ultimately, it’s only a footnote.

For the last two months, I’ve been working as a technical advisor in the patent group of a law firm. It’s great to be back at a company; the environment and atmosphere is really much more suited to me than a research lab. Moreover, this is, so far, the best job I’ve ever had.

I’m hesitant to say that I love my job because I’ve only been there two months, and it could just be the novelty or the initial excitement. I mean, I would hate to go around bragging about how great my job is and then have to eat those words later on. In fact, the last couple of weeks have really dragged.

Since I’m the new guy, I just don’t have that much work to do, and the work that I have had recently, has all been boring, procedural kind of stuff. What I really love is responding to office actions from the PTO because it involves a lot of critical thinking and arguing. I also really enjoy legal research and reading case law. I like getting to learn not just what the law means but also how it got that way. That bodes well for law school, I think. Another exciting thing about my job is that I get to learn about all sorts of cool new technologies and products.

I like that my work has a direct impact not only for my clients, but also for everyday people. For example, one of my clients makes nebulizers and inhalers for treating respiratory ailments like asthma. By working on patent prosecution and other intellectual property matters for this client, it allows the scientists to focus more of their energy on developing new treatments for patients. A lot of the patients most severely affect by asthma are young children, so I get a good feeling from that.

I have a fair amount of responsibility, which is cool, and a lot of freedom. There’s no one watching me clock-in in the morning. I just have a goal for how many billable hours I should have for the year (but since I’m the new guy and just learning, that’s kinda moot anyway).

It is weird that I have a secretary—she’s not exclusively mine, but it’s still very strange. I actually got an e-mail the other day inviting me to a bosses’ day appreciation luncheon. And it was addressed to me, along with all the other supervisors in the building. I just stared at it for several minutes, trying to comprehend that I was somebody’s boss.