They may take our rehabilitation bins, but they’ll never take… our FREEDOM! On Sunday, K release some baby water turtles that she had been over-wintering. Fortunately, we’re all of a mile from a good place at which to release turtles, Jordan Lake, so we didn’t have to drive too far. The big one in the image set is a male (note the long nails for better, um, gripping) slider and the other three are painted turtles (you can see the orange on the underside of the shells in the images in the gallery). ...

For the first time in about 10 years I planted a garden. We are always drawn to shaded lots, so we’ve never had a place for one before. Even here we’ve got five acres… and they are all wooded. Normally? Great. For a garden, it’s kinda the suck. This year, I decided to plant a garden in the right-of-way/frontage and the heck with what the neighbors think. So, raised beds to avoid the clay soil problems, fencing to keep the deer out (btw - know any bow hunters? I may be a vegetarian, but the deer are getting on my nerves), and we’re set to go. ...

Tomorrow is April 15th, tax day. And in case you’ve missed it, republicans, flat taxers, gold fetishists, racists, defense nuts and other extreme conservatives are planning to host tea parties tomorrow. Tea parties? Yep. Protests, harkening back to the days of the Boston Tea Party when proto-American patriots dumped tea into Boston harbor to protest taxation without representation. Tomorrow’s tea parties appear to be a bit less principaled. Some protestors are objecting to the Bush tax cuts on the top 2% expiring in 2010… as they were scheduled to do by republican law makers. Some protestors seem to object to having lost the election in 2008. Others object to bailouts of home owners… or is it bailouts of banks… or is it bailouts that don’t help their bottom line? Some seem to object to having a black president. Others are Ron Paulites who seek to restore the gold standard?! ...

Some of the more social people from my high school class in Louisiana are apparently putting together a reunion. They’ve managed to track down maybe 90+% of the class and have just sent out a (scanned?) copy of the senior class photo. I defy you to find more 80’s hair in a picture. The sad thing is that I can’t put names to the majority of people here. Maybe 10 at most. I guess that either means there’s no point in going to the reunion or that I really, really need to go. ...

I’m never a big fan of April Fools day, mostly because I’m too guilible for my own good. That said, on occasion I get in the mood. This year, a colleague and I discussed sending out an email to the staff of our company, regarding the IT infrastructure. We got permission from the boss, because, well just because. Here’s the text that we sent out: April 1, 2009 Dear Employees of XXX, ...

I wasn’t originally going to write about the Michael Gerson piece from the other week where he talks about the “hidden virtues” of a recession. Leaving aside the irony of a relatively well off speech writer for George W. Bush telling us how the recession caused by his boss’s policies will be good for us, I just assumed that the idea of a virtuous recession was self-obviously wrong and wouldn’t be taken seriously. But since then, I’ve heard other people, even more liberal people, make the same arguments. In several of those cases, the argument is that a recession will help (force?) Americans to lead simpler lives, to save more and to focus on what is really important. I’m offended by that sentiment because, while I have often thought, and said, that people need to focus on what’s important and that they should save more, there is a huge difference between doing so as a choice and being forced into it due to scarcity. ...

I guess it’s a good thing that the Treasury department is releasing more details on the banking “stress tests.” That said, the engineer (or the circuits lab TA) in me can’t help but hear “smoke test” any time someone says stress test. In engineering, you wire up your design and power it up for the smoke test. If it doesn’t start smoking, there’s no guarantee that the design (or wiring) is right, but if you do release the magic smoke, then you’ve definitely done something wrong. Because, of course, the magic smoke is what makes all electronic components from resistors to microprocessors run. Maxwell with his electro-magnetic equations was full of it. Every thing runs on magic smoke. If you let the magic smoke out of a device, it’ll never run again. I do wonder what is the magic smoke analog that gets validated in a banking stress test. Do you wire up the bank and see how much money it leaks? Can you put the magic green stuff back in a bank which fails a stress test? Well, presumably some banks will survive, which is probably a good thing. If for no other reason than banking is a more diverse field than engineering. After spending a day with 200+ engineers I can tell you that, too a first approximation, we’ve only got one gender. The workshop was a giant sausagefest in all of three ethnicities: caucasian, asian and indian. As a profession we’ve got to do something about this.

I’m over at the Compressive Sensing Workshop today. I wasn’t too sure about compressive sensing as a topic, but after reading the abstracts, it seems to have a lot of application to basic image processing. Or at least the same concepts are applicable. One logistics note. Attention conference centers everywhere: speaking as a tea drinker, it would be very nice if you would reserve a carafe for hot water only. Never put coffee in this carafe - ever. No matter how well it is washed, coffee will leave an aftertaste that will sneak into the hot water and ruin even the best tea.

K and I don’t eat much meat - no red meat, no poultry, etc. Theoretically, we still eat fish, but since I won’t cook it… This weekend, we experimented with a couple of new recipes that, in hindsight, were even vegan: Vegetarian Mac and Cheese. Like a lot of people (I suppose), I love macaroni and cheese. Not the Kraft, out of the box, kind, but one made with onion, garlic, mustard powder in a homemade cheese sauce. Unfortunately, K (okay, me too) isn’t supposed to eat that much high-fat cheese. I’ve been making it with low-fat cheese, but well, that’s a little lame. Last week, a guy at my office gave me a recipe that eliminated the cheese sauce and turned out to be (possibly) tastier than the original. Start by sautéing an onion in a little olive oil. Add a drained, rinsed can of cannellini (other beans work, but cannellini are wonderfully creamy), 1.75 cups of water (or vege broth), 1 tbsp of miso paste (I used soy sauce), a little dry mustard and a half cup of raw cashews. Puree, then add a package of cooked spinach and use as the cheese sauce. It’s wonderful. We also made seitan which, as near as I can figure, is pronounced satan. It’s wheat meat - wheat gluten (which means it’s also pronounced “death to etselec and hlf”) and water (or broth) which is cooked and then used as if it was regular meat. We made ours with water, soy sauce and some Italian seasonings. Once it was cooked, we sliced it up, braised it and served it with a wine/mushroom sauce. It was great and a *lot* easier than I thought it would be.