Week 71 - Autofocus

This week is Christmas, and as such, about time for me to admit I'm fighting some bugs. Having Hannah in daycare brings home just about everything and when she isn't sniffling, my wife is running a fever, and when they both feel fine it's my turn. So we've all passed bugs around and with any luck that's the end of it. Someone heard I was feeling a bit down this week and shared a photo with me. I may not be a doctor yet, but I'm pretty sure this would be the perfect prescription for most any ailment. After all, when has more whiskey been a bad thing? Well... there was that one time... let's just say I've learned a few lessons along the way.

Figure out if the girl you just met has a boyfriend, or two.

Note, don't mix with heavy doses of NSAIDs...

Don't leave anyone behind when you bike home...

Get a better picture of the concert of a lifetime with Eric Church...

Never karaoke. Never.

Seemed like a good idea at the time... doesn't mean it was.

Not as cool as you thought you were...

Pay for a hotel room. Your neck will hurt in the morning.

Watch out for curbs.

Don't forget the girl passed out in the bathroom.

Things might be louder than you expected.

Let your friends cut you off if you forget to do it yourself.

Biking with 60 beers is hard enough, do it sober.

No 2 people should ever be served this much at once. Not even if they are champions.

Anyhow, so it's Christmas this week and we are very excited to celebrate it as a family. With the LOI out of the way and a break between period 3 and period 4 of CO35 (our advisors both banned fermenter work over Christmas break), we have a bit of time to sit and relax as a family. It's cold here now, thought not too cold, and fires in our fireplace are much nicer this year with dry wood. Last year's green/wet stuff was not really that fun but now we have some real fires. Christmas day, that's where I sat the entire morning and afternoon. I love to feel the warmth on my back.

The in-laws came over to visit and we all crowded back into the fireplace room, pretty much a miracle. Hannah didn't really figure out the whole gift opening thing, so there are still a few gifts down there that will probably be waiting for a few weeks. She would much rather just chew on the bows, so helping wrap gifts the week leading up to Christmas was just as exciting for her as the gift-opening festivities afterwards. We have also made it one year into the Santa Claus gig, and I am actually in full support of it. My wife talked me into it and I have to admit that my take on it has changed a bit. I suppose it is good for a child to have something to believe in that's exciting, to perceive the world as magical and happy. We all know that once they grow up and realize what a twisted piece of crap we've turned it in to, they'll wish they could just go back to believing in Santa again. 

Who needs gifts when you can soothe your gums on a bottle?

I would be remiss if I didn't say thank you to everyone for the thoughtful gifts this year. I feel very special and loved, and I would even if I didn't receive anything. But the thought that went into the gifts means a lot to me.

The holidays are also airsofting season around our house, so I thought I would share a couple pictures of the top tacticians in the game, still living high after the night ops ambush back in October. Don't ask me why but we always seem to airsoft when it is literally freezing cold outside. I think it has something to do with better turnout when people have more layers to stop the pellets. Whatever it is, tactics go out the window for my sister once she has to sit in one spot where her hands on a cold, metal trigger. So let's just say she didn't fare as well this time as we did on our last trip out. Guns also seem to jam a lot and while some people have an intuition for a bad gun or jammed magazine, she doesn't. I caught up to her once only to find out she had been firing blank for over 30 minutes. I want to help so badly but I just don't know where to start...

Sis in her show-off pose before she realized she didn't know how to use the gun.

With all of the Christmas gifts and time spent at the parentals', I went in search of my old camera case so that we might be able to use it for our new camera and the extra lens that we bought with it. In the process, I dug out my old point and shoot by Olympus. Twenty years ago, this was as good as it got in the automatic camera world, complete with a digital display on top that told you how many pictures were left on the roll of film! We sure have come a long way since then, but sometimes I think the technology now supersedes the ability of the people who possess it. Back then, we had to struggle to get autofocus to pick up on the right things; it was touchy and unpredictable. But with practice, we figured out how to train the focus on different parts of the frame to change the light reading and exposure even though the camera didn't come with any settings to choose from. People marvel now at the pictures I can take with a digital point and shoot, but you have to realize where I came from to understand why I can get such great performance out of simple cameras. With all of the settings that are available now on the cameras, how could you go wrong? There is truly a setting for anyone's preferences. But people just plan on the camera to correct everything for them and can't figure out why their pictures might not be as good as they hoped.

The things is, we have so much technology now that we take for granted it will make our lives easy, and it does. But in the process of making our ability to take pictures easier, we have dumbed down the art in the process. And that is just like statistics in my everyday work. Graduate students and even professors have this mindset of autofocus - we will run stats the same way everyone else did before us and report the data just like that. But without knowing experimental design and the correct way to analyze data based on the specific experiment in question, scientists are not using the full scope of new stats programming to their benefit. They lose accuracy, power and ultimately impact from their data either by analyzing incorrectly and counting on the program to make corrections or by under-analyzing and not using their brain to determine what should be modeled and examined. It is a challenge even for me up on my soapbox to remember not to just "plug and chug" with statistics but to be thoughtful about what I look at and why I do it. We need to look past the autofocus and remember how it works and what it can do for us.