Month: November 2007

I just laughed my ass off

Seriously. It fell off, and my intestines are spilling out on the floor.

John Scalzi has put up a Flickr album of his trip the Creationsit Museum. People down the hall must have thought I was crazy because I was laughing out loud for so long. Be sure to read the comments; even the most mundane photos have a chuckle from the other people who have looked at them.

Interesting Statistics [College Athletics]

At the moment, I’m attending the University of North Dakota, which is currently in the process of moving into NCAA Division I for some unknown reason. I went to undergrad at St. Lawrence University, which is Division III in everything but hockey. Now I know it’s sometimes ludicrous to compare the two, but I found out some interesting things from the Office of Postsecondary Education website.

Undergrad Enrollment (here’s the big difference):
SLU: 2,111
UND: 12,833

Unduplicated Athletic Participants (men and women):
SLU: 636
UND: 447

Already, this begins to look interesting. SLU has more students involved in intercollegiate athletics, TOTAL. If we take that to percents of total undergrads, we get:
SLU: 30%
UND: 3%

Yes, only 3% of UND students are involved in intercollegiate athletics! I don’t know how this stacks up against other schools, but to me that seems really, really low for all the hype that surrounds them.

If we look at the money (and this is the weird part), we get expenses like this:
Total Athletic Expenses:
SLU: $5,616,179
UND: $11,250,249

And we get revenue like this:
Total Athletic Revenue:
SLU: $5,616,179
UND: $11,414,689

I’m not sure why SLU’s net balance comes out to be $0. It might be something to do with losing money on teams (maybe since they have to pay for it somehow, they can’t have a negative balance?). UND’s balance is a shocker: Apparently the school made $164,440 dollars last year on athletics.

I admit that I’m a little biased against UND already for putting so much money into athletics to serve a whopping 3% of the undergraduate student body, but did they really make a profit? Will this continue when they have DI bills to pay? Something tells me that the switch to DI is going to cost more than $164,440 per year.

You might wonder why I don’t give SLU a hard time about not making a profit at all in athletics. I have to ask you this–are athletics for the students, or for the university? There is a lot of money flowing through SLU, and if some of it can be used for athletics to keep the athletes happy, I can live with that. Not so with a school at which only 3% of the undergraduates are part of the athletic program.

UPDATE: I’ve been discussing this in the City Beat blog comments.

Leopard and MySQL – Getting them to play nicely

Although it seemed like everything worked out well last night, I ran into a problem getting MySQL to work. Apparently I’m not the only one. With the newest version and some help from the sites below, I got it to work, but I still can’t make the Preference Pane turn MySQL on and off 🙁

Developing Chris on getting MySQL to work.

Angry-Fly on making the Preference Pane work, but this hasn’t yet worked out for me.

Essentially, I was reduced to opening up the permissions floodgates to all users (since I couldn’t figure out how to make _mysql the owner of the folder, rrrrr) and then making myself the owner of the /usr/local/mysql folder. One of these must have done the trick.

Does anyone know how to make those invisible users show up so I can give them ownership of files?

Leopard upgrade notes

Here I am, finally having upgraded from Tiger to Leopard on my 1.67 MHz 15″ Powerbook. I’m still not sure if its faster or better yet, but I hope to keep reporting on what I find out about it.

Issues:
1. When I first restarted after upgrading, I wouldn’t get past being able to see the desktop, some icons, the dock and the info bar at the top. Then I would get the grey screen of disappointment (read: kernel panic!) and have to restart. This was due to a problem with startup items. It looks like the problem was Little Snitch, but I haven’t tried anything else to see if it could have been Mail, iCal, SizzlingKeys, or iChat.

2. The Sites folder didn’t work! Luckily, this guy figured this out before me. However, it also looks like PHP didn’t carry over for some reason, so I am downloading a new PHP install to work with Apache 2 from my favorite PHP/MySQL site.

3. The dock is kind of ugly–what’s with the shiny floor? Luckily, it looks like there is a solution. This worked for me.

4. Azureus has just quit a couple times while I wasn’t watching, but I’m downloading the latest version, which should work out better. UPDATE: Seems to be working fine now!

Happy Leoparding! Does anyone have any other stories?

Confusing Words #1 – Carbonaceous

Some geology words just add confusion to the reader.

Confusing word:
Carbonaceous – Relating to the organic or carbon content of the rock. Example: “This siltstone is really carbonaceous!” when referring to an organic-rich siltstone.

Could be confused with:
Carbonate or derivative – Being made up of a carbonate compound (usually calcium carbonate). Example: “The carbonate shale was very thick” when referring to a mix of clay and limestone minerals.

Since “Carbonate” is a word many geologists learn much earlier than “Carbonaceous”, I think the latter should fall out of use. “Organic-rich” is a much more descriptive term.