2nd day keeping the food diary today, and I think it was a bit more successful than yesterday – I kept myself to my calorie budget (as long as I keep from eating anything else in the half hour or so until we go to bed). Keeping the diary helped me remember to skip things I didn’t really want to eat, like cookies, and to stop grazing the Xmas candy haul before I blew my budget right out of the water.

I think tomorrow will be another great day with the food diary – hopefully I can keep to the budget again…

 

At the end of the first day of keeping the food diary, I am pretty happy with the process. I have an app on my iPad called myfitnespal – this makes the whole thing streamlined and simple, so there’s little overhead to this new habit. I ended up a few hundred calories over my goal, but still under baseline, so I’m in the weight loss regime for the day (and the overage is partly due to all the extra chocolate and candy around the house left over from Xmas).

 

In an effort to get back into blogging (at least semi-regularly) I am re-rebooting 52 new things – its a new year (at least from a geo- and euro-centric perspective, so I’m going to try the whole new habit each week experiment one more time. The last few times I’ve started off with overly complicated diets – and failed miserably… this time around I’m going for a simpler first target with the intention of building up momentum as I go – this week, I’ll be keeping a food diary to try to watch what I eat and to keep my caloric intake at reasonable levels (it was staying low for the last few months then unaccountably ;) spiked in the last few weeks – based upon my observations of my weight and girth at least).

I’ll check in with how I’m going tonight.

 

Because I’m getting close to finishing, my ability to find things to procrastinate about is increasing…

Today there were painters in one of the admin offices, and they had moved a bunch of stuff out of the office. Including this (slice of) rock.

Now, I looked at this a bunch of times during the day (it’s between my office and the coffee machine), but I never really thought about it – it’s a rock, and I’m an atmosphere guy. But near the end of the day, one of the geologists pointed out this feature:

It kind of looks like a growth within the crystal. For a few moments we were perplexed – a growth like that couldn’t really happen, could it? Then we realized what was actually going on – take a close look at the layers of precipitated crystal.

———————-^^^—— Here is the intersection between the crystals precipitating off the walls and the crystals precipitating off the intrusion (unless the font messes up the position of the carats ;) )

You can see how the precipitated layers around the “growth” are mirror images of the layers growing out from the walls of the cavity. What must have happened is that there was an intrusion of rock from the inner wall into the cavity that ended just outside the plane of this cut. Then, when the layers of crystal formed, they also formed around the intrusion, creating this interesting feature.

Here’s the plane from the back:

And above:

 

The orange monster Martin will headline this new initiative withs a recurring feature that’ll teach kids about experimentation.

via Sesame Street Wants To Make Math and Science Fun Again.

^ This is cool!

 

My paper (Andersen J. A., Z. Kuang, Moist Static Energy Budget of MJO-like disturbances in the atmosphere of a zonally symmetric aquaplanet) has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate. The current manuscript is available here, and I’ll link to the EOR version when it appears.

 

For “fun” over the last few days, I’ve been looking at some of my old undergraduate textbooks and trying to see what I remembered. One thing I was vaguely still aware of (from 1996 or so) was the use of integrating factors to solve simple first order ODEs. So, once I figured them out again, I thought I’d write it all down here to help me remember for next time.

So, imagine you have an ODE like this:

Now, it would be nice to simplify the left hand side – to fo this, consider the following:

which is the left hand side, multiplied by the integrating factor . So, if we multiply our original ODE by the integrating factor, we can then make the simplification:

where c is the arbitrary constant from the integration of the right hand side, and can often be evaluated with initial (or boundary) conditions.

Related articles

• How do you convert second order differential equations to first order differential equations (wiki.answers.com)
• The Existence and Uniqueness Theorem of Ordinary Differential Equations (statement) (unapologetic.wordpress.com)

 

I’m going to resist including my own (unpublished) contribution in this list of important MJO related papers. The papers are listed in reverse alphabetical order – because I scrolled backwards through the reference list of my paper looking for papers to put in this list. I’m sure there are papers I’ve left out, and there is certainly a bias introduced by my particular interpretation of the MJO as a moisture mode. I’ve included links to pdfs or abstracts where they were easy to find.

1. Zhang, C., 2005: Madden-Julian Oscillation. Rev. Geophys., 43, RG2003.
2. Wheeler, M.  and G. N. Kiladis, 1999: Convectively Coupled Equatorial Waves: Analysis of Clouds and Temperature in the Wavenumber-Frequency Domain. J.Atmos. Sci., 56, 374–399.
3. Wheeler, M., and H. H. Hendon, 2004: An all-season real-time multivariate MJO index: Development of an index for monitor- ing and prediction, Mon. Weather Rev., 132, 1917–1932.
4. Sobel, A. H., E. D. Maloney, G. Bellon, and D. M. Frierson, 2010: Surface Fluxes and Tropical Intraseasonal Variability: a Reassessment. JAMES, 2, Article 2. DOI:10.3894/JAMES.2010.2.2
5. Roundy, P. E., and W. M. Frank, 2004:  Climatology of Waves in the Equatorial Region. J. Atmos. Sci., 61, 2105–2132
6. Maloney, E. D., 2009: The Moist Static Energy Budget of a Composite Tropical Intraseasonal Oscillation in a Climate Model. J. Climate., 22, 711–729.
7. Madden, R. A., and P. R. Julian 1972: Description of global-scale circulation cells in the tropics with a 40 – 50 day period, J. Atmos. Sci., 29, 1109–1123.
8. Kiladis, G. N., K. H. Straub, and P. T. Haertel, 2005: Zonal and vertical structure of the Madden-Julian Oscillation. J. Atmos. Sci., 62, 2790-2809.
9. Fuchs, Z., and D. J. Raymond, 2005: Large-scale modes in a rotating atmosphere with radiative–convective instability and WISHE. J. Atmos. Sci., 62, 4084–4094.
10. Boos, W. R. and Z. Kuang, 2010: Mechanisms of poleward-propagating, intraseasonal convective anomalies in cloud-system resolving models. J. Atmos. Sci., 67, Accepted.

 

Yeah, I failed to keep this up again, so it’s starting again. And, seeing as I’ve slacked off on the diet front, I am going back to my first week’s thing…

Here’s the thing: I want to do lots of different things. Too many things, in fact – I think I’ve been suffering from a kind of good idea overload, combined with a self-discipline underload that has lead to me starting many habits that seem like good ideas, only to give them up in a day or so, or just never starting them in the first place.

These posts are designed to fix this. My plan is to pick a new* thing or habit that I want to try out each week and commit to following that habit for the week. This has the sneaky knock on effect of giving me something to blog about besides work (because I don’t seem to be able to do that consistently) and giving me a reason to blog regularly – ideally I want to blog about my plans for making the habit go each morning and about how I went each day in the evening. Then I can post a summary of how it went at the end of the week and decide if I want to keep the new thing up.

Regarding the new things, I’m not sure what the next thing will be – I’ll have to flick through my various books to see what grabs me, but I’m planning on sort of alternating between health, career and family – the three things I have going on in my life at the moment, but I might pick things that fit in two categories, or none. And I reserve the right to discover new categories at will.

The plan this week is to try a new diet – the “Slow Carb” diet, which I’m taking from Tim Ferris‘ book Four Hour Body. I need to reread that chapter as I go this week, but the crux of things seems to be to avoid everything that turns into blood sugar quickly (for 6 out 7 days) – so no bread, pasta, potatoes, rice – basically no starch, or sweet fruits. Instead, lots of vegetables and protein.

Keeping away from starches seems like it will be a challenge (I’ve been kinda-sorta doing this this week too, and it’s been difficult – I usually eat lots of pasta and sandwiches), but I think I can handle it, for a week at least. I’ll weigh in tomorrow morning and we’ll see how I progress.

*For various definitions of new, including but not limited to: Actually new to me; Things I used to do but stopped a long time ago; Things I’ve tried in the past but never managed to make stick; Things I sort fo do already but don’t do consistently or properly.

 

Rereading the relevant parts of the book, I’ve noticed that I ought to begin with a definitive set of body measurements – so tomorrow morning I’ll post Weight, Body Fat percentage and some circumferences so we can track my progress.

 

Rain over Cambridge this afternoon stopped just before sunset. I think this shot is showing the setting sun’s light catching some sort of precip falling from the stratiform layer that is still covering almost the entire sky.