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I spend most of my time in northern Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire. There are an inordinate number of vanity plates around here, particularly from the State of NH. I have one, actually. They're cheap, and they're easy to get. (You can order them online.) I've heard some people — particularly people from other regions of the country — make fun of people with vanity plates in NH. They've never seen so many in one place.

There's a reason for that. New Hampshire has a relatively small population compared to Massachusetts and New York — 1.24 million, putting it at 41st in the Union — and where do most of these people live?*

In Southern New Hampshire. The northern regions are relatively unpopulated.

The Oxford English Dictionary places the number of words in the English language at ~500,000. Some of these are longer than 7 letters, but they can be abbreviated or shortened. Words can also be spelled by substituting numbers for letters as well. (l33t-speak) Zeroes cannot be used because they can be confused with the letter O.

So for simplicity's sake, we'll say there are 500,000 desirable letter-number combinations. (There are actually closer to 6.1 billion — 25^7 — but only a tiny fraction are desirable.) Figure that the 80% of the population is concentrated in the southernmost 50 miles of the state, and it's easy to see why you see so many vanity plates in southern New Hampshire. It's not that the absolute number of plates is higher than, say, New York, it's just that they're all in one place.

*For reference, Essex and Suffolk county (Boston and Metro North) have a combined population of ~1.3 million people.

License plates, vanity plates, New Hampshire, math

This is largely copied from post over at polyscience.org:

There I was, re-opening shop, only to disappear after a week or so. Now I'm moving on, permanently. As in, leaving the business of science writing. Over the last six months, my interests have been slowly shifting, and I find myself interested in "science" as a general concept less and less. I'm more focused on business, medicine, and the business of medicine.

I never thought I was particularly good at writing about science and science-related things. I always felt as though there was someone who knew more, someone who could convey my ideas better than I could. I also felt as though it was a relatively new niche. I discovered quickly that I had been mistaken. It is for these reasons that I am no longer going to be writing about science and related interests.

While writing for polyscience.org, I always got the most enjoyment from writing about medicine. Specifically adding commentary to news articles written by journalists whose first area of study was certainly not medicine. In the meantime, I've also picked up quite an interest in business, and so it only seemed natural to marry the two ideas.

Thus, On The Pharm was born. I've been writing there for a few days, I can honestly say that writing for it does not feel like work. Indeed, it's more fun than anything else, probably because 1) it's easier and 2) I don't have to learn so many ideas from scratch like I did when writing about science as a whole. I can focus on my niche, and that's what I want to do. I also like the look of the site much better. So without further ado, here is my latest work-in-progress:

URL: http://onthepharm.net
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnThePharm

Some stuff will be technical, some will be fluffy, some will be business-oriented, and some of it will be tongue-in-cheek. And all of it will likely be informal. I prefer to talk in my posts as though I'm talking to a person, and I hope that comes across, unlike here where I pretended to be an omniscient narrator. I'm writing for it every day (so far), and I have a small backlog of material from the last two weeks, but I'm slowly clearing it out.

I can only hope that it'll find a niche of readers so I'm not listening to myself echo in cyberspace. I've decided that I'm not going to be half-assed this time, either. I'm going to jettison my (utterly ridiculous) dedicated server which costs me $120/month — though it's a great deal for what I get — simply because I don't need it. As soon as my contract with iweb.ca runs out, I'll be moving both this website and polyscience.org over to DreamHost who is currently hosting On The Pharm. Their packages are unbeatable, and I'll likely never outgrow them. (Though it would be awesome if I did!) If the time ever comes that I need my own dedicated server again, I will likely go back to iweb because they were just that fantastic. (Read my review I linked up.)

I spent a lot of time on the layout and colors. I would like to make some money with this venture, which is why I said "doing it right" earlier. I studied ad layouts, and I'd like to see if I can effectively make some money without interfering with layout too much. I think I've done a pretty good job so far — I'd love to get some feedback from you guys. I think the ads blend in well, and it would be nice if they generated a decent CPM once I get more traffic going to the site. Given the nature of what I'm writing about, each click should be worth more than a few pennies — though that's certainly not why I chose my niche.

I still need to come up with some ways to drive traffic. My niche is pretty specific, and doesn't really appeal to places like Slashdot or digg or boingboing, so I need to come up with other ways to drive traffic. I haven't had time to really look into larger websites that I could submit some of my stuff to. We'll see what happens in the next week or so. I'm approaching this like a part-time job, and I'm trying to put in some real solid, uninterrupted time each day to add content. I hope it pays off.

writing, On The Pharm, Pharmacy, medicine, blogging

Addwaitya, a 250 year-old tortoise died today. Sad. It was older than the United States. Older than the Declaration of Independence. Sort of puts things into perspective, eh?

Rest in peace.

So my almost-but-not-quite-forgotten medical dictionary is now up to 0.0.2. I added some 20,000+ words to it yesterday, sorted it, removed duplicates, and re-packaged it.

I removed the versions for Word < 2003/2004 simply because I don't feel like taking the time to split the file into 15 different parts. Office 12 is almost out; it's time to move up to a newer version of Word already.

Anyway. I'm not sure where I'm going to come up with more words, but I also thought that last time and now here I am. I'm going to submit it to the library at school to see if they want to email-blast the students with it. I know I'm not the only one who'll find it useful if they do.

Download and enjoy!

I've written up a "grand-reopening" post on polyscience.org. I've decided to go back to writing for myself, even if it doesn't have a huge number of readers like Nobel Intent did. Writing for someone else isn't the same as writing for yourself, particularly when you enjoy building and working toward something, even if you're not sure what that something is.

Anyway, I'm glad to be back doing things for myself — it has been gnawing at me for about a week or so.

I've been doing a lot of poking around on the Intarweb today. Looking at pictures of various radioactive materials, and just doing a lot of reading in general. Naturally, I came across the Wikipedia entry on Madam Curie, and the quote under her photo just sort of struck me for some reason.

Marie Sklodowska Curie, one of the few people to win two Nobel Prizes in different fields, was one of the most significant researchers of radiation and its effects. Until her granddaughter recently had them decontaminated, her notes were radioactive.

That's like, seriously geeky.

I'd like to start my own collection of radioactive materials and stuff made from materials that was at one time radioactive. Old Fiestaware, uranium glass plates and figurines, revigators and such. I'd like a radium watch, too, but that'll have to wait until I'm out of school.

Another thing: I placed an order for some tritium keyfobs/glowrings, whatever you want to call them. I'll post pics when they arrive.

tritium, madam curie, glowrings, radiation, radioactive materials

I've decided to go for my radiopharmacy certificate on the way to becoming a PharmD. Ironically, this was facilitated by my not passing one course this past spring. It pushed back my YoG to 2009, and left me with what amounted to an easy spring semester. (I took the Fall off.) So I filled it with radiopharmacy courses, which means I'll be graduating at the same time as I would have anyway, plus an extra certification on the side.

I need 12 credits to be a full-time student. The courses that I need to take before I graduate only amounted to 9, so I needed some more. So I added 3 radiopharmacy courses, so I'll be taking 17 credits this spring. That leaves just one more radiopharmacy course before I'll be certified (upon graduation).

Cool!

radiopharmacy, mcphs, pharmacy, nuclear medicine, PharmD

A few weeks ago, my shiny new laser printer arrived. I bought it because I wanted to print things to read offline — I have a hard time reading large amounts of text on a screen (though I have no problem writing), and I wanted a way to read many of the things that I thought would be interesting. Normally, I'd leave them in a tab in a browser for a few days, lose interest, and then close the tab. I can't even begin to guess how many things I wanted to read, but never did. In the hundreds, anyway. I've been doing it for years.

I discovered that many websites have a convenient little "Printer friendly" option. The BBC, Yahoo news, etc. And many of the things actually worth reading are formatted so simply that you don't need a printer friendly option because that's the way it's going to be formatted anyway. Basic webpages look like shit on the screen, but they're lovely on paper.

Here's a rundown of just some of the stuff I've read in the last week or so. These are just the full-length articles, not the short news blurbs that I print out as well.

• Inside the KLAT2 supercomputer
• Quantum search algorithm implemented using off-the-shelf optics?
• The Ars Technica Motherboard Guide: Part I — motherboard fundamentals*
• Breakthrough of the Year: Evolution in Action
• Road test: Four databases tested*
• Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District*
• The end of the period*
• LISPing at JPL

* Denotes an especially excellent article

It's a safe bet that I wouldn't have read any of these articles if I hadn't printed them.

(And yes I'm recycling the paper. :p)

Today the Dover Intelligent Design case came to a close — Ars has some great coverage — but I wanted to explore the notion of why and how the Intelligent Design controversy ever took place to begin with.

Fundamentally, it all has to do with the way news works. The other day, boingboing.net had a great article which explained to the layperson how news is created. (Journalists and others who "create" news largely know how this operates already.) For the most part, the creation of news is done one of two ways. The first way is that a journalist goes out, cultivates, and then writes a story. The second way is via press releases. This is true for business news, science news, almost any kind of news you can think of.

For instance, most of the news that a publication like New Scientist covers is actually rehashing of press releases that can be found on eurekalert.org. So when someone mentions that an "original article" can be found [insert New Scientist/BBC/news source link here] — this is actually not correct. The original link — unless it's a story a journalist went out and found on their own — can be found on eurekalert, or another, similar press release website.

In the realm of science, press releases serve two purposes. The inform the public (and publishers) of various scientific breakthroughs at academic institutions, or they can be the tool of a company like Sangamo BioSciences to let the world know about a scientific breakthrough that their company has created. I wrote about such a story yesterday in Nobel Intent — in general I don't care where breakthroughs come from, a breakthrough is a breakthrough regardless of whether it's accomplished by a non-profit university or a for-profit company. Motivations might be different for each, but a breakthrough is a breakthrough.

In any event, in a case like the Intelligent Design case in Dover, PA, their campaign was largely based on the idea of "teaching the controversy." The Controversy, of course, is an entirely fictitious creation: there is no controversy within the realm of science. There is, however, a controversy when it comes to melding science and faith, especially amongst Bible literalist circles. The Discovery Institute (and the Thomas Moore Law Center) successfully conflated this idea in the public eye. In fact, they created it specifically for this purpose. (Much the same way that "Cyber Monday" is a term fabricated by retail associations whose goal it is to drive holiday sales.) Made-up terms have quite a lot of influence on the public, particularly when they are picked up by the mainstream media and reported as Truth.

In the case of Intelligent Design, there is no controversy, except that which the Discovery Institute — a conservative Christian think-tank — created. And then released into the wild in the form of press releases which could then be picked up by the mainstream media and eventually make its way into the minds of mainstream America. The campaign was largely successful: reporters have been reporting the Intelligent Design case in Dover, PA by telling both sides of the story in an effort to appear fair and balanced, not taking into account that one side of the story (the alleged controversy) is completely made up to begin with. As a result, fringe beliefs are given the same equal time as real scientific theories in the eyes of the public, introducing fear, uncertainty, and doubt into mainstream thought. The responsible thing to do would is to call ID what it is: a creation by a fringe group for the express purpose of bringing creationism back into the classroom under the a-religious guise of "intelligent design."

Unfortunately by exploiting the convoluted way that "news" is created, ID proponents under the auspices of the Discovery Institute were able to shoehorn a non-existent controversy into the hearts and minds of the American public with the help of the mainstream press — who should largely know better. Unfortunately, political correctness and efforts to deliver "fair and balanced" reporting only exacerbated the (non-)situation in the first place.