Swan-Song, Draft 1/ n

In case you can't click the title, click here.

This is my absolute first public draft of Swan-Song. Warning: this story is NOT for the easily offended for the following reasons:

1) Gratuitous fart and toilet jokes
2) Potentially politically / blasphemously offensive material in general

Well reason #2 is pretty weak at best but with people being so easily offended these days, thought it would be a good idea to put a warning. With that, here's the absolute first draft. Revisions, as always, will be coming up as I clean up and develop the epic further. Enjoy!

I Dreamt of Durians

I don't know what got into me, but I was dreaming that I was holed up in my office and protecting territory and research from the hordes of football players, cheerleaders, and politicians. All I had were my Chek-Mate Crusader longbow, 8 arrows, all with Razorcap broadheads, and some durians. I scored perfect double-lung and/or heart shots with the arrows 8 broadheads but that wasn't enough to repel the entire horde of evil entities trying to stop me on my quest. So I started throwing durians at them and for every durian I threw, two more showed up magically. I took out a lot of enemies with well-thrown (or not-so-well-thrown) durians because they can and will inflict some pretty good damage. Plus they do have an area-of-effect to take their advantage and give me some advantage (or remove a disadvantage). Let's just say I'd rather use a nice, sharp broadhead with a reliable bow, much more accurate and safer for me, but I guess I better keep a durian or two around for self-defense, especially during football season when there's a lot of idiots around, stupidity is glorified beyond reason, and I'm not allowed to protect myself in other ways.

Swan-Song Quick Update

Cabin fever, a general sense of "I hope this is adequate for an exploratory analysis" aside, and wondering what I did to offend my insides aside, thought I'd just put a little blurb on Swan-Song

I've been on an unusual roll on Swan-Song, courtesy of the large number of mind-blowingly boring things I've had to sit through and frequent bouts of severe stomach woes. I'm expecting to post a first draft after I finish up my soil-landscape modeling final. Swan-Song is NOT for the easily offended. I will write more on it when I actually finish my first draft and post it.

Shadowhawk is currently on a bit of a hiatus because of some rather interesting things that came up in Swan-Song. More on it later too.

From the Cave

Still holed up in my lab and finally got the artificial neural network to run and give me useful results. It actually did pretty well -- used a feedforward back-propagation flavored one after getting frustrated at trying to code perceptrons. It's a very trivial case: trying to predict productivity class based on 6 different Landsat bands + NDVI + EVI + elevation + aspect + slope, but at least it works. The real fun? Trying to map out the classification tree results because apparently CART doesn't give me outputs to stick back into ArcGIS like my neural network code that I did in MatLab... although CART did give me a nice set of tables and trees to stick in my write-up.

Darn if I got a penny for every profanity at the !#$& football fanatics uttered (actually uttered or thought of) today, I could probably afford a new Hoyt Ultra-Elite with a full set of Shrewd stabilizers, a CBE sight mount, a decent magnifying sight, a nice set of strings & cables from Winner's Choice, a matching T.R.U. Ball Sabertooth 360 4-finger release, and a dozen Carbon Express Nano arrows built and fletched to my specs. I could even here all the hubbub all the way from Newins-Ziegler and it's a difficult sprint from here to the football stadium.

Ok, think my lab computer has unfrozen up so I can resume working instead of thinking up what the Nine Layers of Hell would look like in my world.

What... The... Frequency...?!

Who the heck is evil or idiotic enough to schedule some massive maniac get-together (read: American football game on campus with those glorified over-sized gully dwarves who get more scholarship funding than most grad students can even dream of) so close to finals?! I'm already ticked off as it is when I had to put up with people getting excited over divine zombies and coprophagous lagomorphs and hideous pastels last weekend, but why the hell with an INTRA-MURAL American football game?! Why would THAT attract O(50k) people on campus and disrupt people trying to get work done!? It's enough that I hate sticking around town over the weekend during deer hunting season, why also have a @#$%&@ spring game right before finals?! I guess that's the down-side of being on a big jock campus.

In the meanwhile... back to CART (which I can't get for my own computer and am stuck using a campus computer) now that I'm done expressing my absolute disgust at the horrific traffic here in town and in/around campus as well as the excessive noise.

Just A Bit More...

I'm really, really hoping my body will hold up long enough for me to at least do some serious butt-kicking on my final project for my soil-landscape modeling class. I've already lost a full day to what can best be described as digestive distress from hell. Without going into gratuitous details, it involved a high fever and way too much time worshiping the porcelain god... so no work got done. I'm still not at full juice but I'm determined to do the best I can and hopefully finish the class with a solid, un-contestable A in the class as well as set myself up for a productive summer. This project is pretty much a mini prototype of what I will be doing summer, so I really want to do the best I can. I know I'm only looking at a very trivial case by using only Landsat data and some forest inventory data, but considering I'm also learning how to use and interpret classification & regression tree models and comparing it to an artificial neural network... yeah. I did shock my adviser a bit because while I was describing my term project, he thought I was talking about my dissertation research so I had to do a bit of a clarification with a bit of "this is for the next week" and "THIS is for my dissertation".

In any event... let's just hope I survive this next week... and that my models will actually run. At least the classification tree is kinda working and I got something that looks remotely reasonable. Wish me luck getting MatLab to read in the data sets so I can run the artificial neural network!

Think Dirt-y and Gassy Thoughts

The title about sums up this stage of my research as well as the state of my stomach (well, the gassy part). I'm currently grounded at home with a very bad case of the stomach flu (and wanted to be considerate of my colleagues, nobody enjoys a constant flux of H2S or repeated 5 meter dashes). I wanted to use the word "Soil" but Soil-y thoughts didn't sound as amusing to me. I survived my soil-landscape modeling midterm and got a pretty good score. Now it's time for me to do the real fun part of the class: the quantitative analysis exercise, which is the final for the class. So I did a literature review on eddy covariance tower footprints so that made me think a lot of gassy thoughts. I might be actually doing this over the summer along with some evapotranspiration modeling on top of NEE (net ecosystem exchange).

Anyway, why the dirty thoughts? Because I realized that I only have 3 eddy tower sites in north-central FL... but I have tons and tons of soil data as well as forest growth increment data. Also, NEE is *usually* closely correlated with NPP because NEE is the CO2 in/out of the ecosystem, while NPP (net primary productivity) is the carbon lost/gained by the primary producers (ie, plants)... which are pretty close even if NEE is gas only and NPP deals with solid stuff. So yeah now I'm thinking for this little final for the soil-landscape modeling (and my summer's work on top of footprint modeling and ET), I'll try to simulate NPP over a larger scale. There are a lot models out there for estimating NPP from growth increment data because foresters are really interested in how much wood you can get from a given stand so there's tons of allometric equations out there. My brain is churning and turning now!