Research Support with a Smile
What am I good for?
I am a Scientific Assistant at the University of Victoria and I am the Senior Lab Instructor for EOS 110, Introduction to the Oceans and Atmosphere.
I know science is amazing and love to participate in
research and promote science education and communication. I support the research and computing activities
of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences,
and manage the Vancouver Island School-Based Weather Station Network.
I do a lot of different scientific computing tasks well.
See some examples of web site design and
programming below. If you're working on custom MySQL and PHP
projects I may be able to help you. An example of one such project is at
EducationHeritage.ca.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. My email address is
carefully encrypted at the bottom of this page. Do not contact me if your
electronic message is about a product you want to sell. I am not interested.
I like photography. You can find a link to my
photos and my
totally underappreciated Instagram page
in the menu at top right and in this sentence.
I am totally social network savvy! I'm on the Twitter, and the Google+,
the YouTube
and also the Facebook. By the way, I marvel that my unique identifier on YouTube is
apparently UCPojD2euJAoDMP24hULkHiQ. That's just me all over! I also manage our
weather station network
Facebook page where we do all kinds of interesting, sciency things.
Links to Some Commentary
I have opinions. Some are probably lacking merit.
- [2016-11-19] My Tom Fletcher is wrong about climate change index page.
- There are no "chemtrails". There are contrails. What may be the earliest description in print of contrails appeared in Scientific American in 1919.
- [2017-03-04] A series of my photos of glass sculpture at the Chihuly Gardens and Glass gallery in Seattle.
- [2017-02-27] A series of my photos of the Space Needle in Seattle.
- [2017-02-27] Fan Tan Alley in Victoria is a popular site for tourists to visit. Number 23½ is a beautiful red door that attracts a lot of attention. #fantanalley #VictoriaBC
- My version of Ed Hawkins' HadCRUT4 temperature spiral.
- [2016-12-30] Michael Hart, Professor Emeritus at Carleton University is wrong about Climate Change.
- [2016-11-19] Tom Fletcher doesn't undertand analogy.
- [2016-06-04] Tom Fletcher is still, still wrong about climate change.
- [2016-05-13] Tom Fletcher is wrong about a graph he sometimes posts to Twitter.
- [2016-05-04] Local writer Tom Fletcher is wrong about climate change.
- A new temperature scale to help christian literalists better express heat-related human misery.
- Bicycle prototypes by ad hoc brainstorming.
- Everyone Should Learn to Program a Computer.
- AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, Match 3
- According to one person who may have other issues to work on I am in on the secret conspiracy with the Rothschilds!
- There's a cyclist counter on the Galloping Goose trail near downtown Victoria.
- IBM has not caught up with OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) and the Tivoli Storage Manager software no longer
works there. Here's how I fixed it.
- 'NASA' wrote about my response to their Earth Observatory Image of the Day post.
- I got some fairly typical climate change denier comments and wrote a long reply.
- A supermoon size comparison.
- The weather station network I manage appeared in the local news.
[Archived PDF]
- In which I claim new 120 km/hr speed limits on some British Columbia highways are dumb.
- Here's a good discussion of recent nonsense from Tim Ball and Watts Up With That. This is here to add a link to good things and reduce impact from bad things.
- I'm annoyed by an anti-scientific iPhone app disguising itself as scientific and political called SkyderALERT.
- I wonder if Vernor Vinge got the idea for the singularity from Tron.
- In which I show you what I learned about
floating point numbers and the round() function in MySQL.
- My last one cent coins.
- I received an email from a local climate change objector.
- James Dellingpole is not a helpful person. More bitter, angry ranting from Mr. Dellingpole.
[Edit 2014-07-22 This commentary on James Dellingpole
really sums him up well, "I felt sad for Delingpole. Why was he even at this conference? He could be at home with his family, playing Scrabble. It seems he is driven by ambition, but had made it no further than the basement conference hall of a faded hotel in Vegas."]
- We checked the calibration of a NikeFuel Band:
GPS Measured Distance Against Counted Steps
- We Got Deer!
-
I find Remembrance Day very moving,
but for personal reasons.
-
Some
comments on three articles in Maclean's magazine.
- A letter to the editor in the Saanich News by someone calling himself
Jay Currie of Oak Bay makes
completely wrong claims about climate change.
- Roger Schank has written more about his opinion that high school sucks. I suggest he has to grow up.
- Just how often does the phrase, "Elementary, Watson" that we all remember
actually appear in the text of the Sherlock Holmes stories?
Zero times.
- I am getting more and more annoyed with complaints that I hear about the BC carbon tax.
- I read and enjoyed Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks. Local copy of this text is here.
- Complete and utter madness. First that there are things called chemtrails and second that they can be fixed with something called "orgonite".
- More On the Future of Science, speeding up scientific publishing will not cure cancer more quickly.
- Living with the Leaf. What's up with electric cars?
- Gasoline prices continue to rise. Sad, silly, foolish people continue to beat their fists ineffectually against shadows.
- Finally! Real evidence of real chemtrails! Proof at last! I'm quite serious. These are indeed real chemtrails.
- What did I see on the red bicycle bell?
- Rex Murphy has a sorry excuse for an essay in the National Post touching on the Alberta oil sands.
- I rant about advertising on the internet...my rant and the ads
- An essay by Richard Price of Academia.edu spurred me to review openly! Is it time to get rid of anonymous peer review? I say no.
- What about these new millions of CPU computers being planned?
Links to Neat Things
A list of random things that have caught my fancy.
Web Site Design and Programming
UVic Climate Modelling Group. My place on the Ivory Tower.
- IDL
- FORTRAN (really!)
- perl (I'm not a big fan)
- python
- php
- MySQL
- OS X
- GNU/linux
- NEC SX!
- used to do AIX
www.VictoriaWeather.ca. I manage an awesome high resolution weather
station network.
- MySQL
- GNU/Linux
- perl
- Python
- IDL
- PHP
UVic Ocean Physics.
- I am now helping Dr. Jody Klymak maintain and deploy EM-APEX floats in the ocean.
These floats are autonomous and move up and down in the water
column measuring temperature, salinity, and pressure, oxygen
concentration, and ocean currents using a very sensitive array
of voltage dectectors (that's the EM part of the name).
Deep Cove Books: An author wanted a simple static site to sell his stock of printed books.
Education Heritage Museum. For this project I transformed
a collection of spreadsheets that were being used as a crude database into an actual database and provided
tools to access the data online.
- Drupal
- MySQL
- PHP
- CodeIgniter
- Python
Solterra Solutions Ltd. I provide a range of scientific programming skills for this team of climate specialists.
- PHP
- MySQL
- Python
- IDL
- Matlab
- WikiMedia
Actuaries Climate Index. I had nothing to do with this website per se but I did do a lot of work with others at Solterra Solutions to devise the index. I developed a library of codeto demonstrate how the index could be computed and I suggested visualizations that could be used to display the information.
Family with a web page
Brigitte Wiebe
Kathleen Wiebe
Rob Wiebe
Joe Wiebe: Joe's new book on beer in British Columbia.
Friends and Acquaintances
I read and enjoyed Ron Miksha's book The Mountain Mystery.
You should read it too. NOTE: a photo of mine is used in the book.
Michael Roth.
Eunice Montenegro
Photography -- the best wedding photographer I know. She's in
Columbus, Ohio, USA. Here's another link to her site.
Andy Arts Professional
Painting in Canmore, Alberta, Canada.
Kevin Bartlett and his amazing non-technicolour surfboard rack.
Climate Sight (A student I worked with).
My MLA and MP
My MP is Elizabeth May who is the leader of the Green Party of Canada.
My MLA is
Andrew J. Weaver who
is a member of the Green Party of British Columbia.