Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Another Cool Invention

The fishing vest is a work of genius. It's great for carrying lots of small objects and it's very comfortable to wear. I used one the last few days for my little jogging excursions and it's just as comfortable as a fanny pack, except much less likely to have a zipper open and lose something. It holds my house keys, cell phone, and iPod very nicely as well as a bit of change if I suddenly decide that my bottle of water wasn't enough to make it back home on or if I get a serious case of the munchies about 2-3 miles out. It's also great for carrying writing instruments and flash drives without worrying about squishing them, losing them, or otherwise overcooking them from body heat. It also does wonders for archery practice, at least until I can get a quiver that actually has a supplementary pocket without a huge hole in the bottom for carrying my release and repair kit. Yeah, fishing vests also rule. So do overalls and camouflage hunting pants.

And now back to writing up my term project for my simulations class. I'm trying to build a really nice little neural network to predict net ecosystem exchange (NEE) using micrometeorological variables. It's a pretty nifty model with five hidden neurons in one layer. I think I might've overfitted it considering I had 8 inputs and it couldn't predict the test data worth crap even if I got an r^2 of about 0.85 when I trained it. Lesson learned and hopefully a mistake I can avoid when I do it for real with my dissertation!

Once this semester's over, I'm going to have to spend some serious quality time shooting. I want to see if I can do some serious butt-kicking in 3-D with trusty little Sorondil-Telcontar and master shooting with a back-tension release so I can also do some serious butt-kicking in spot-shooting. Hopefully my butt doesn't expand to get molded to the chair and/or engulf my poor bike seat by the time I'm done with finals. My gut's already struggling to fit into a lot of the desks in the classroom and my butt's engulfed one chair on campus already.

Ok, exercise and then work on my project. I hate it when I'm in danger of getting my butt impaled by my bike seat or when I block the doorway with my corpulent self.

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