bohnsack.com

An AP story that was on the front page of today's Albuquerque Journal:

Study 'Vindication' for Low-Carb Diet.

iphone or millionare via Get Rich Slowly.

This year, Elisa and I went into the wilderness with a National Forest Christmas Tree Permit to cut down a tree. We were assisted by Elisa's sister, her husband, and Elisa's parents. We went to the Cibola National Forest, near Magdalena, New Mexico, where we could see the VLA radio telescope in the background:

In the Cibola National Forest, looking out onto the VLA. Click on the image and view a large resolution version to see the telescopes.

Elisa finds the tree - a Piñon Pine.

I start to saw it down.

Larry finishes cutting it down, as everyone watches.

I drag the tree to the truck.

Into the truck.

Up in the house.

Aftermath.

Decorated.

My brother Craig Bohnsack was married on September 1st 2007 to Kayla Cichon. Naturally, I took a lot of photos. More than 600 are here.

Here's what they looked like:

I'm been doing a little bit of consulting to get Erik Erhardt's SISUS application working on his website. This has involved integrating Linux, Apache, Apache Tomcat, Perl, R, and various R libraries. The first cut seems to be working, and I'm very excited about it.

SISUS is a Bayesian statistical model and software aiming to provide a comprehensive solution to stable isotope sourcing inference and prediction problems. Erik is a Ph.D. student and statistical consultant that I met in a parallel processing class we both took from Barney Maccabe in the spring of 2006 (CS442).

I can't claim to understand the statistical underpinnings of what SISUS is doing, but do understand conceptually that it:

• Offers an easy web interface for biologists and other scientists to solve a very interesting problem by simply uploading an input deck via a web interface.
• Does some sophisticated statistical processing using R (I guess that's the "Stable Isotope Sourcing using Sampling" part).
• Automatically creates publication ready graphs and other results for the user.

This such an incredible idea! If you're an academic that's created something new like Erik has, the default is to write a paper that others can use to try and recreate your work. While "the paper" will probably always be required, I think this online SISUS tool represents what successful researchers will want to deliver in the future. That is, the successful academic will say, "My paper is a good reference, but if you want to use or reproduce what I've created, just go to my website and access the new knowledge as a service."

Awesome!

Think of the increased number of citations you'll get by providing an easy web interface to your work vs making someone reproduce everything from scratch. Seems a no-brainer to me.

If you need a solution to stable isotope sourcing inference and prediction problems, check out SISUS, and if you need other statistical consulting contact Erik. He's wicked smart, and I honestly don't know another person as dedicated to quality and excellence as he is.

Elisa has a new weblog at http://hur-hur.com/

For my birthday, Elisa bought me one of the most elite presents that a map-o-phile like me could receive. It's a raised relief map of New Mexico:

The company that made the map makes all kinds of other ones too. For example, the Seattle area, the entire US, Minnesota, and Glacier National Park.

Elisa and I spent the last 4 days trying to get back to Albuquerque on a route that should have been an easy 1 day trip:

Day one was supposed to be Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, but I40 was closed into New Mexico, so we had to stop in Amarillo, TX.

Day two was spent in an Amarillo hotel room, waiting for I40 to open. While driving around the city in the ice looking for something to do, the driver's side window on my car fell off the tracks, so we had to get some plastic and duct tape and kick it ghetto style for the remainder of the trip, as there was no way to raise the window.

Day three was spent in a run for New Mexico on I40 that only made it ~ 60 miles before we were stopped for more than two hours. By the time we made it back to Amarillo, all the hotels were booked solid, so we ended up going 1 hour south to Plainview, TX for the evening.

Day four should have been a 5 hour drive from Plainview to Albuquerque on I40. We made it, but it took us more than eleven hours in stop and go bumper-to-bumper traffic in a sea of semis.

Good times.

Never Forget

Blake's Lotaburger, which also goes by the "If you are what you eat, you are awesome" slogan:

Our friends...

We got caught in a flash flood on Saturday coming back from Magdalena Old Timer's on highway 60, on the way to Socorro. It was quite exciting...

All the photos are available here.

There's also video here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Here's a video of Cuboro action that I took this afternoon. You can hear Charlton Heston laying the smack down on Yul Brynner in the background.

Update: Additional Cuboro action #2 and #3

Easter Turducken!

Cuboro...

I have never been to a major amusement park. For me, this is a point of pride.

Yesterday I proposed marriage to Elisa, during a nice walk in the mountains at Doc Long Picnic Ground. Thankfully, she accepted (she blogs about it here).

It was a beautiful day in Albuquerque and the East Mountains – almost spring, with just hint of chill in the air. The mountains were peaceful and restorative, after many weeks of stress at work and school. The festive sounds of a picnicking family and their excited Spanish conversation greeted us at the entrance, but after only a short walk into the forest, it was only us, the wind through the trees, and the rest of nature's majesty. Near the end of our journey up the mountain, we scrambled up a steep bank onto a sunlit trail, walked some more, and I knew it was go time...

We stopped at an especially well framed portion of the trail. I knelt and then very emotionally proposed. She said, "Really!?", I replied "Damn Right!", she said, "Yes.", and all the world's chaos was transformed into a system of two, two-variable linear equations. Great mysteries became intuitively obvious, and jigsaw puzzles solved themselves spontaneously.

After it was done, we walked a bit more and came to sit on some large rocks that overlook the highway, as it snakes up to Sandia peak. We talked about our future together and said to ourselves, while watching people motor up the mountain, "Look at us way up here in the mountain, and look at you down there oblivious to us and our happiness." It was goodness of the highest order.

Never, ever, did I anticipate being lucky enough to find someone so beautiful, intelligent, determined, grounded, curious, loving, supportive, and just plain wonderful to share my life with. Well... I have. I love her unconditionally, she loves me back, we're going to be married, and I couldn't be happier.

We've yet to make any decisions on dates or make any specific plans.

When I was in France, I saw a road sign that said something like 1,432 km to city XYZ. I quickly turned to my travel companions and exclaimed: "Look, 1.432 megameters to city XYZ!".

It seemed like a perfectly valid (and possibly slightly clever) observation to me, but as I recall, everyone looked at me very strangely.