tmarthal.com

Note: this post was delayed posting a few days for no reason other than the fact that i forgot to publish it. so i think that i experienced the most coincidental set of events in a single weekend ever last weekend when a friend and i road-tripped up through new mexico and into the durango/silverton region of colorado. 1/ cross canadian ragweed ; c created a mix cd for me two months ago with one of thier songs on it; i was listening to that exact song on the way to pick up c driving to durango; we just happened to pick a restaurant (Ore House) Friday night in durango for which we have to wait 30 minutes. While waiting, the place right next to it has Cross Canadian Ragweed playing for 20 bucks. Its rock-country, the kind of stuff that they play on country stations. The dude reminds me of Skynard, and the show was extremely good except for the oklahoma people in the crowd. 2/ Jeep tour. My phone number is the same as thiers . The only difference is the area code. Duu duu duuuuh. 3

i know everyone has heard that cnet wrote an article about google's ceo and included some basic personal information in thier article about privacy and intraweb crawlers obtaining 'private' information published on teh intarnets. well, it turns out that while 'marthaler' isn't that common of a name (there should be in about 30 years after me and my 4 brothers have 5 boys each...) you still can't find too much information about me on the web. it turns out that there is some powerful ceo/business guy in chicago with the same first and last name as me. and that there is a whole wisconsin /minnesota marthaler family. the only way that you can even see how i have impacted the documented world is by searching for 'physics' along with my name. and then you only get an article about how i won an engineering competition back in the day . Well, it turns out that there are better ways of obtaining personal/address/phone number/martial (and marital!)/age inf

So i recently upgraded my mobile from a small Samsung phone to a thin flip form-factor Motorola Razor model. This is only the third ever phone model that I've had, starting with the smallish Nokia back in 2001. I forget the samsung and nokia model numbers... maybe ill look them up. Nah. My first Nokia was awesome. The software interface was very intuitive and kept track of everything in a very proper and sensical manner. Up/Down buttons accessed what I wanted things to access and menus were easy to navigate and things just worked(unless I didn't know better, and just assumed that was the way things worked for all phones). I bought the Samsung because it was the only phone that Cingular was offering in 2003 that was a non-clamshell small enough to be comparable to my nokia. It wasn't so good. There was an LED on the phone that would blink. All. The. Time.(1) Granted, you could change the color that it would blink from blue to orange and back to blue, but still, it was an

In late July, BBC published an article about the process from which one species of butterfly can divert from another. The article's main point is that two very-similar species of butterflies living in the same geographic area only mate with others of the same species based off of a small mutation which produced marks only distinguishable to butterflies of the same species. "This has the effect of discouraging inter-species mating, thus encouraging genetic isolation and species divergence." Which has always been one of the aspects of evolution that I always found difficult: how could one individual mutate/evolve and then pass its modified genetic information onto its predecessors? How would its predecessors know to only mate with other evolved species? This article and study is very insightful in shedding light into that, and could be (speculation) the divergence between how fish became snakes became lizards became ????. Of course, I found that article from /. wh