Please Hold, Your Call is Very Important To Us

Wow...this raised the hackles

2009-08-18T10:53:00.001-07:00

Berlyn decided he wanted to bring a stuffed doll to the daycare today. Happens that this doll is a teddy bear sized stuffed version of the Hindu god Ganesh from the movie "My Friend Ganesh" that my sister sent him from India. He was very considerate in taking off all the bangles so that "Nobody would break them" and was pretty excited to hang it in his cubby.

The lady who watches the kids, who I know is religious, asked what it was. When I told her her face changed to a frown and she said, "Oh!". Apparently having a graven image in the classroom isn't something she enjoys.

After telling me with a shocked expression that they have "Over a million gods in India" she said, "They have so many problems over there!". I left it at that and didn't expound on the similarity of the hindu gods to the trinity, or any deeper meaning. I'm beginning to think that literalist religion is antithetical to multiculturalism, which is no surprise given the "my way or the highway" beliefs of most monotheistic religions.

Favre a Viking?

2009-08-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

Looks like it finally happened. The nemesis of Vikings football has signed a contract to play for the other side. Interesting...

Wow..just, wow!

2009-08-15T23:18:00.000-07:00

WOW! This takes the old, "If a savage is born and dies without knowing Christ?" question and puts it on it's ear. It's more like, "If a person is born Hindu, and you're to dumb to understand what that means, does that excuse your crude and racist attempts at conversion?"

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

And sometimes I catch myself wondering why surveys come back saying that most kids can't find Iraq on a map, or that only 18% of Americans know what party is in control of the house, who the secretary of state is, and who the prime minister of Britain is? This video explains why. Stupid people really do exist...and in vastly greater numbers than one might expect.

Liberal Bias? Not CNN

2009-08-14T21:25:00.000-07:00

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Britons including Prime Minister Gordon Brown have leapt to the defense of their creaking healthcare service after President Barack Obama's plans for a similar system in the United States were branded "evil" by Republicans.

The above quote is the lead from a CNN story about how the British are reacting to Republican criticism of their national health system. What bothers me is the use of the word "creaky", something that would be fine if it were addressed in the article but is not. This leaves an obvious bias in the article, but a completely unfounded one. I am not British, but I have heard no rumors of NHS being on it's last legs financially or any other way. There may be problems, but calling it creaky is the pot calling the kettle black. If NHS is creaky our system is a smoking wreck.

Second, the statement, "Barack Obama's plans for a similar system in the United States" is simply a fabrication. The bills in Congress right now are nothing like Britain's NHS. NHS is a single payer system directly funded by taxpayer dollars in a country with virtually no private insurance plans except in niche markets. Obama's plan, or rather those written by congress as Obama never formally set out a plan, is at least 90% based on private health insurance with the possibility of a small public option which may or may not grow depending on who you talk to. The congressional bills are based on a mandate that requires people to have insurance, and requires insurers to cover everyone, this is lightyears away from single payer, government run systems. NHS does not mandate anyone have insurance, in Britain simply being in the country is enough to guarantee you are covered.

I personally think it is shameful that we aren't looking harder at single payer, although possibly less like the British system given that we obviously can't completely eradicate the private insurance systems overnight. Most of the waste in healthcare is in the inane billing systems set up by insurance companies, and the costs as insurers scramble to jettison anyone who might possibly be sick now or in the future, causing huge costs down the road which are eventually absorbed as bankruptcies (medical bills being the second most prevalant reason for bankruptcy in this country) and by the federal government through low income insurance like Medicaid and payments to hospitals to cover emergency room care for the uninsured.

The idea of allowing for-profit health insurance is sickening to me. Should health be driven by profit motive? I don't think so. Yet there is little talk of reigning in the ridiculously lavish spending on executive pay in the insurance industry. Republicans?? I hear plenty of Republican grumbling over wall street pay, why are you silent on the excesses of insurance? At the very least I would like to see insurance forced to be run as non-profit. Although Blue Cross (the largest non-profit insurer) is far from perfect, there is a much lower temptation to profit through denying care in that system than a purely for-profit one.

CNN is a terrible source of news, but this article is anything but liberally biased. Has anyone showed this to Fox News? They should be crowing from the rooftops over this one.

I feel so loved

2009-06-21T15:51:00.000-07:00

Moscow was picked for one of the new so called "Atheist Billboards". I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Great Fathers day

2009-06-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

What a great fathers day. My mom decided to make up blueberry pancakes that were cooking just as I woke up. Yumm!! Then Berlyn and I went to Moscow and met up with Mommy. Berlyn did an admirable job of keeping his fathers day secret from me for a whole week...then slipped on the way to the mall with the revelation that we were going to the batting cages. That was alot of fun. I haven't hit a ball in a long time.

Berlyn is a natural with a bat. He has no fear whatsoever of the yellow balls flying at him, and steps right into the pitch. He got two turns in the cage adn hit 8 balls by himself, and a bunch more with my help. He really smacked the last one of the day. You can see it on the video.

Then we dropped into the icecream shop in the mall and had ice cream cones. Yummy! All in all it's been a very nice fathers day.

Holy Sh, F*n' Insane

2009-05-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

Who knew that the falls I went to all the time as a kid would be run by a kayaker. Previous to this the people who where best known for going over where drunk college kids falling off the rim by accident...none of whom survived.

Take that...

2009-05-17T00:38:00.000-07:00

...Second, I like very much the spatial take of your analysis. I think it is creative, useful, and effective...I think it makes an interesting contribution in framing the study. Third, in the second half of the paper, you do a very good job of explaining the information, then analyzing and summarizing it. This is terrific...In the end, this is a well researched and well framed history. I hope that it served you well in some way in your graduate work.

Prof. X

This goes out to the chumps who thought I'd lost the touch since my undergrad days. I'm an OC*. I took my knocks in the 90's but don't be half-steppin', I can still write a term paper in the 00's better than half ya'll sucka's!

Just kidding. But I am pretty proud of the fact that I can still write 28 pages of academic primary research in less than 24 hours, hand it in two minutes before the deadline with the paper still warm, and get an A. Add to that only two hours of sleep while writing it, and averaging less than five hours of sleep for the previous 5 days. As a bonus throw in two previous all-nighters that week. Heck yeah, bring it on!

*Original Christiansen. The last name of the prof who started us all out freshman year with the expectation of a 50 page term paper...and didn't give us the research topic until two weeks before the end of classes. (It ain't Compton, but it was certainly a school of hard knocks that semester)

I'm Done!!!

2009-05-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

I turned in my last paper of the semester today. It feels great to be done. For various reasons this semester has been the busiest I've had so far and rivals only my first semester at Mac in terms of the sheer number of all-nighters. I'm to tired to explain, here's a pictorial of the events of my last week.

Feeling really smart...

2009-05-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

...and incredibly dumb at the same time.

I've beaten myself about the head all week trying to figure out a homework question for my multivariate statistics class. I finally gave up on it and focused on preparing for my first masters committee meeting this morning (Which went well BTW). I actually turned in the assignment before class today figuring it was a lost cause.

Then...the prof was illustrating another unrelated problem and there was the answer, clear as day in front of me! I feel quite smart at the moment. Unfortunately the answer was aggravatingly simple. Still...it's nice to figure something out in this class. The professor has made it a constant struggle with his own unpreparedness and inability to get the simple concepts across, let alone the complex ones.

Still, I can now explain why minimizing the trace of the pooled covariance matrix of a dataset is equivalent to minimizing the sum of squared error criterion when doing discriminant analysis. Try dropping that nugget of knowledge at your next dinner party!

I'm quickly becoming a super-nerd!!

What did I say?

2009-04-14T01:20:00.000-07:00

I guess I wasn't far off.

In the end, it was a single moment that brought the hostage crisis to its dramatic finish.

Three gunshots. All three fatal. Fired in the dark by three specially trained U.S. Navy SEALs as the pirates' boat rocked in the water off Somalia.

"Phenomenal shots -- 75 feet away," said Navy Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, who oversees the region.

A senior defense official said each was a shot to the head.

This article says everything I expected and a bit i didn't about how the pirate hostage standoff ended. 75 feet isn't that far, but apparently from what I've read the only reason they got that close was that the pirates agreed to be towed out of rough water by a Navy boat.

Ever tried to hit a moving target with your .22 while standing on one leg? That might barely approximate the difficulty of nailing a head shot in rolling waves. Now imagine three people doing that within a split second. And imagine dealing with the nerves that come with violence, and knowing that an innocent hostage could easily die if you are off target or your timing is slightly wrong.

Although I can't say I'd want to do what they do, the Navy Seals definitely have shown their skill. Wow!!!

Like a movie

2009-04-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

Wow! The pirate drama off the Somali coast is like something out of a movie. These kinds of things rarely end well, and never seem to end quite the way anyone plans. It is really nice to hear that the captain of the Maersk Alabama is safe.

It's regrettable that they couldn't negotiate a solution, but from the pirates perspective they couldn't win for losing in that situation. They endured about all the bad luck and poor planning they could handle by that point. I hate to see anything devolve into violence but if it had to happen this was the preferable outcome. I'm guessing this will be a teaching example for Navy Seals long into the future.

We don't have all the information but I'm assuming that Seal snipers probably had alot to do with it, anything closer range or less surpising would have provoked them to kill the captain. If so, those guys are the best of the best. Shooting with that kind of precision in a short time span would be hard on land, doing it with the added variable of pitch and roll on the open ocean would be near impossible. Even with a Barrett .50, a great scope and helpful technology that kind of shooting is as legendary as Annie Oakely.

I'll be interested to hear more as information leaks out...and watch the movie and read the book. I'm assuming the captain will get a seven figure advance for his story and likely a hefty sum for the movie rights in this media saturated age. I'm sure he would rather not have had the ordeal, but a bit of recompense is probably therapeutic at this point.

CADIE - Jane - Enders Game

2009-03-31T23:20:00.000-07:00

Google has a link on their page to the CADIE project.

Introducing CADIE

Research group switches on world's first "artificial intelligence" tasked-array system.

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Its a bit too dense of prose to be a real thing. I think it's an April fools joke. A good one though, for sure.

It does remind me of Jane from the Enders Game series by Orson Scott Card. Jane is an intelligent program that lives on the interstellar communication network but hides herself from humanity. She's benevolent, but knows she is humanities worst nightmare. An interesting character.

I wonder if she creates webpages full of panda bears like CADIE does?

Lock Bumping

2009-03-29T23:31:00.000-07:00

To anyone who hasn't heard of lock bumping it is the technique of opening a lock by "bumping" a key with each peak ground to the lowest setting in order to open a lock. Bumping means tapping the key end with a hammer to pop the lock pins up and allow the lock to turn, thus picking a lock that you don't own a key for. Scary how well it works!!!

I've never tried it, and was always a bit skeptical of how well it worked but tonight I got a bit of practice. The door to my office has a lock that's seen better days. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of work to get it to turn. Tonight I was here late finishing an important assignment and left for the bathroom. I spent a good 5 minutes trying to get back in. With the motivation of an important assignment that needed doing I finally remembered "Bumping". So, I put the key in almost to the last pin, struck it with the back of my pocket knife, and Wham-O! The lock opened the first time.

Now, my key was fit to the lock, so it's sort-of cheating, but it gives you a feel for what is possible. Here's a video that shows just how easy the technique is even on tough locks.

There are a thousand how-to's and demos on YouTube if you get interested. Just don't go using it on anyone's house, you're libel to meet the business end of a shotgun, or the inside of a jail cell. But it is academically interesting trivia to know and there are even lock bumping competitions out there for those with a competitive bent.

The womb as a weapon...

2009-03-24T21:45:00.000-07:00

"The womb is such a powerful weapon; it's a weapon against the enemy," Campbell says...

A Christian God, that is. Campbell says if believers don't starting reproducing in large numbers, biblical Christianity will lose its voice.

"We look across the Islamic world and we see that they are outnumbering us in their family size, and they are in many places and many countries taking over those nations, without a jihad, just by multiplication," Campbell says.

This isn't anything too new to Catholics but the sentiment is rather scary. This is a quote from an NPR story on the Quiverfull movement among conservative Christians. The idea is that God says be fruitful and multiply, so you shouldshun birth control and actively try to have as many kids as you can.

I've always wondered if anti-birth control folks understood the implications of exponential growth, this story proves that they at least understand them enough to use them to short term advantage. The idea of breeding your way to religious dominance is better than a crusade I guess, but it brings up its own set of major ethical issues.

Of course, not believing in evolution they probably don't think about the fact that in the past family size was limited severely by disease, infant mortality, lack of food leading to sterility, and just plain shorter lifespans. The average American could easily breed themselves into ill-health and a broken down body since the only limits on their family size is their fecundity. This doesn't even take into account the impact on the planet.

We are currently the only species on the planet that has yet to hit it's ecological limits. Our growth is running at a wildly exponential pace, increasing by the billions now in very short time spans. Eventually we will hit our carrying capacity, either through lack of water (the leading contender at the moment), disease, starvation, energy collapse, or nuclear holocaust due to political ramifications of the aforementioned. We can bump up against carrying capacity gently through population planning, or ram into the ceiling at full force with disastrous consequences. It is an inevitable fact that we tend to blithely ignore that there is only so much room on the planet. Are the ethics of bearing children only to hasten this fate truly less important than following a vague rule in a 2,000 year old book and going to get your vasectomy reversed?

You know my thoughts on it, I'd enjoy hearing yours.

Do they have otoliths?

2009-03-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

Luckily Dogbert hasn't tried microchemical tracking using their ear bones!!

Kooky

2009-03-14T00:11:00.000-07:00

I took a trip down to Boise for the annual American Fisheries Society Idaho chapter meeting. It was a great time and a long but scenic drive. On the way down there I passed this sign on the road through the Salmon river canyon. I just had to turn back and take a picture. Only in Idaho would you see such kookery on government signs.

It turns out that this bit of religious kookery is also represented on the internet so you can torture yourself with the stunted and mangled godspeak that cults are made of. It's like a mix between King James english and legalese, worse than your average charasmatic wackaloonery. All I was able to get out of it is that the leader and his partner/wife (I didn't see mention of a congregation) believe that Jesus is the antichrist, lives in Gods house, and God is about to wage war on him to get it back, thus somehow bringing on the end of the world and punishing the sinners in teh process. I think anyway...the gibberish is pretty thick.

Lucky for you there is also 3 CD's worth of free praise music as well. The woman who sings them has a nice voice, but the songs and introductions are a bit over the top. They seem like nice people, and not the type to amass weaponry, so I say live and let live. Still, it's hard sometimes to believe how wacky this stuff can get.

On the up side, I can't think of a more beautiful place to live. As cults go the Yahweh 666 Warning Assembly has several legs up on cults in such fiendishly boring places as Waco, Texas and other sundry places. That's Idaho for ya!

Trick Candles and a 4 Year Old

2009-03-03T01:44:00.000-08:00

Today is my Mom's birthday and Berlyn had a ton of fun outfitting her cake with candles. He even made sure to put in two trick candles and could hardly contain the secret. You'd never know he put them on by the surprise in his voice when they relight, and relight, and relight again. This is a pretty funny video.

My laughs for the day

2009-03-03T01:23:00.000-08:00

Isn't this world wonderful...looks what it's coming to...I always wanted to eat at a soup kitchen, looks like we all might get our chance if this keeps up. But...on the bright side...it's fun to watch the big-wigs squirm.

That's what we needed at my last job, a corporate Jesus (Pronounced Hay-Soos).

Click on the cartoons to view then, they don't shrink to size when you embed them. Sorry.

Sleeping life

2009-02-19T17:36:00.000-08:00

Whew! I'm finally awake after a week of less than adequate sleep. This really sounds like my state of mind this week (and reminds me of a paper written by a certain friend freshman year at Mac, a paper fueled by late nights, caffeine and ephedrine).

According to a case described in the medical journal Sleep Medicine, a 44-year-old sleepwalker logged onto her computer and emailed out party invitations to friends...The mails themselves were perhaps not up to the woman’s waking standard; each was in a random mix of upper and lower case characters, badly formatted and containing odd expressions. One read: “Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm. Bring wine and caviar only.” Another said simply: “What the…”

If you've recieved any weird emails from me please disregard them.

I managed to get way behind in all my classes after the ski trip to Silver Mountain. I realized this weekend just how far behind I was when I started into my statistical ecology homework (three assignments behind). It took me nearly ten hours to complete the mathematical proof to show that the Poisson distribution approximates the binomial. That time was spent basically giving myself a crash course in algebra and calculus. I haven't used them for over a decade and my skills were rusty to the point of inability to function.

I'm now mostly caught up after spending 3 of the last 5 nights out past 3am doing homework. Today I brought Berlyn to preschool and went back to bed at 8:30am. I woke up at 1:00pm and nearly missed an important meeting at school. Wow!

Basketball

2009-02-15T12:58:00.001-08:00

My dad and I have had the good fortune to score two sets of great tickets to the WSU cougar basketball games in Pullman. The games are too loud, long, and late for Berlyn most of the time but he wanted to see real basketball being played. So...we braved returning to my alma mater to see a Garfield-Palouse High School basketball game. Here is a video of Berlyn watching the action with one of his preschool buddies that happened to be there.

In case your wondering good 'ol GPHS Vikings pulled out a victory in grand fashion against the overmatched Walla Walla Valley Academy Knights. The final was 94~30-something, with the third string players having to run a stall play for much of the last 3:00 minutes in order to keep the score under 100 and maintain a modicum of respect for their opponents pride. I guess God was not on the side of the crusaders that night.

It is funny to see a highschool game again. The players are so small. It doesn't help that their lineup this year is very short anyway but I seem to remember thinking we were alot bigger than we were when I was a highschooler. Ah...the hubris of youth.

Tim Coles is still the coach and despite being 13 years removed from the team I still knew exactly what defensive and offensive sets they were in. In B-league basketball there is simply no stopping the matchup-zone defense. It is strange though to find yourself yelling specific instructions to the players as a form of cheering; "Flash from the weak side to break the press", "If they cover the middle the strong side forward has to flash to the ball", "C'mon! Middle man has to rotate over when the ball is on the wing", "Jab step and flash to the ball in order to get open". It's like I'm in highschool all over again. Scary!

Skiing with Berlyn

2009-02-15T12:48:00.000-08:00

My lab group went to Silver Mountain last week to go skiing. What a blast. My advisor brought his kids so we had a gaggle of youngsters plying the slopes for the first time. Berlyn is a natural. Here is a video taken in the first 15 minutes of skiing, followed by a video from later on in the day. Sorry for the poor quality of my phone cam.

about 5 minutes after the first video was taken some skiers saw berlyn in mid run and gave him a thumbs up. Berlyn had the presence of mind to look at them and give a thumbs up while hurtling at toddler speed down the hill. The effort unbalanced him and he nearly wrecked but pulled it out into a sweeping spin that left him gliding the last 25 feet or so in a reverse snowplow. I know that I was not that coordinated when I was his age.

For more pictures of the mountain, and riding the worlds longest gondola to get there, check out my photobucket page here.

The hair of the dog...

2009-02-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit tired today. 'A bit' is really an understatement, I spent the majority of the night laying in bed and contemplating the complex relationships that govern when a salmon decides to travel to the ocean as a smolt. Before you ask, no, I don't know why I felt compelled to sort this out in my head until 3:30am in the middle of a three day weekend. I think (as much as thinking is possible today, anyway) that I have it sorted out in my head now.

Given my state of mind I did a double take when I heard this snippet of conversation behind the counter at the local hipster coffee house in Moscow, ID:

"Yeah, but I think he's just too psychadelic for me...I mean what's with the whole making beads out of the bones of his dead dog...and making a sweater and then burning it?..."

This gives new meaning to, "The hair of the dog that bit you". I swear that my mind wasn't playing tricks on me. This is reality in Moscow, Idaho.

In case this seems to bizarre to be true, there are multiple links on google for this

Dog hair sweaters

Tropical Insanity

2009-01-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

This article from the New York times really gets me. The gist is that due to economic conditions in the tropical countries many people are moving to the city and abandoning arable land. This land is then growing back into forest and acting as a carbon sink. Apparently, according to the article, there is a "debate" among scientists as to whether or not we should decrease our efforts to save tropical forests since these new second growth forests may be sucking up enough carbon to make up for the lost primary forest.

This is wrong on many levels, maddeningly wrong. First, I doubt that there is any serious debate on this topic. However, the news must make a story so they find some wingnut and twist his story into a debate. This happens way too often and is die in large part to the lack of qualified science editors in news organizations.

For a primer and some great pictures of the difference between primary and secondary tropical forest visit this site.

Second, there is a clear distinction, even in temperate forests, between primary (old growth) forest and secondary forest. Yes, it is true that secondary forests are carbon sinks, they may even suck up carbon at a faster rate than old growth due to their higher growth rate. However, the forest is very different. It only has one canopy, there is a marked decrease in species richness (marked being often greater than 50% fewer species of all animals, plants and birds), it is also more susceptible to fire (a previously virtually unknown problem in the wet tropics until we started cutting down the forest at the clip we have become used to). Also, it is not guaranteed to proceed into primary forest, and even when it does develop taller trees and multistory canopy it is much less diverse. Worse, some forests have a very delicate balance that, if disturbed, would likely never return. This includes things such as Varzea forest in the Amazon in which the annual flooding has induced fish, bird, insect, tree and mammal species to develop complex interrelationships. These forests will never come back the way they were if they are destroyed.

Third, who says that economic conditions won't change. Up until recently it was easy to get a job, now with the economic downturn that may change drastically. For poor peasants in the third world it is better to be a subsistence farmer than a poor, homeless bum in a city. People will begin to recultivate these areas. Large farms will probably do well. Commodity prices could easily spike again as they did last winter in the midst of the current recession. Also, commodities are fairly stable and concrete compared to other investments. I'd rather have an acre of fertile tropical soil than a $100,000 mortgage derivative investment at this point. To divert money from saving primary forest in the hope that abandoned land will stay as forest is a pipedream.

This is to say nothing of the need for species diversity. If this is ignored completely in favor of simply looking at this from a carbon balance perspective we've lost the battle. We are currently causing one of the greatest extinctions in the histroy of the world. Like it or not we are tied into the food web, the fewer species there are the less stable that web becomes. Similarly, we lose the opportunity to sustainably exploit these resources in ways we have yet to discover. The argument is tired and old but there may indeed be great medicinal value in some of the species in tropical forests. And this is all glossed over by our moral imperative to keep our world safe for our children.

I would like to know the full story on this. I doubt that there is truly a large debate in the scientific community, although I would say there is certainly a good amount of righteous indignation toward this Joe Wright guy. His position is completely untenable and lacking any long-term thinking. If we were to take him seriously we would lose one of the greatest treasures and greatest resources this world has to offer. If this story did indeed paint Joe Wright and the controversy in the proper light he is a stooge to be ignored, not a serious force in tropical science or conservation.

Bad Voodoo's War

2009-01-23T10:26:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you are all aware I am totally against the Iraq war. It was poorly intended, poorly planned, poorly articulated, and poorly carried out from the beginning. Despite the fact that the reasons and intentions of the war were completely corrupt from the start, it is people - our friends and family - that are fighting that war. As a democracy we sent these people to war. They deserve our respect and support for the excellent job they are doing at the task we've set them to, regardless of our political views. Furthermore, time doesn't go in reverse. We're there now, whether the reasons given for the war were sound, and our job is to make Iraq a decent place to live. War is hell and we do have a responsibility to help heal the wounds to any degree that we are able.

A man from my highschool, Sgt. Jacob Demand, died in 2004 in Mosul and is mentioned in the video above from Frontline, part of the excellent Bad Voodoo's War story they produced. He was a Stryker commander. I got wind of this video and it answered alot of questions for me that I hadn't really asked myself when I heard he died. It sounds like the Jake I knew. Jake was a hell of a guy. I didn't know him closely, although in a school of only ~100 kids you know everyone more or less intimately. He was a grade ahead of me.

I remember once when I was in third or fourth grade Jake used to mercilessly tease and prod me on the bus. I was a quiet kid who was probably far too sheltered and credulous. Jake, as usual, was garrulous, playful, and a bit hard to take. I put up with it for several weeks until one day he started hitting me in the back of the head and flicking my ears from a seat behind me. I turned around and hit him square in the nose, bloodying it badly enough that he apparently had a hard time hiding it from the bus driver when he got off after me.

The thing about Jake was that he did everything for a good time. When I finally had had enough he was cool with it and it never happened again. There were no retaliations for my nearly breaking his nose. In fact, the next day he was making everybody laugh with the story of how he had tried to cover up the evidence from the bus driver to avoid punishment for fighting; evidence, according to him, that by that time was running down his hand and arm. In the spirit of most grade school fights we were better friends afterwards. In fact we got along pretty well for the rest of my time in school, as he did with nearly everyone. There's something about punching a guy in the nose, you just feel a connection with him that sticks around I guess. I've always thought pretty highly of Jake after that and after hearing of his death he pops into my head at the strangest of times.

He later played the right guard and tackle positions next to me on the football team. If, as center, I was the leader of the offensive line Jake was the motivator. He was loud, in your face, and could get the blood pumping in all of us. Somebody on one of his memorial websites mentioned that before every patrol in Iraq Jake would yell, "This Rocks!," no matter how bad the patrol seemed to be shaping up. That sounds like Jake to me. He was also excellent at playing mind games with the opposing defense. There wasn't an opposing defensive linemen that wasn't reminded who was in charge, not-so-subtly chided about their mother, or made to look foolish with a well timed one liner preceded or followed by a thunderous blindside pull-block or switch from Jake. He also worked as hard as he talked, something that can be rare in someone with as big a mouth as Jake could have from time to time. From that I can see why he would have been a good soldier.

It doesn't surprise me that Jake died helping his friends, or that even in his last moments he kept doing what needed to be done to make sure they were safe. If you didn't know him he might have seemed brash, a hell-raiser (he was certainly a daredevil) or to possess a mouth slightly larger than what he could back up. Jake lived for people though, he never pushed them away and his braggadocio was never a result of insecurity as is often the case. He was always trying to make somebody laugh and I get the sense that he was that way because he cared personally for people and their happiness. I know everyone says that those who have died were 'always trying to make people laugh'. It almost sounds trite now after all the news of deaths in far flung countries over the last few years. In this case it isn't a trite pleasantry, Jake really spent the majority of his life making people laugh with whatever he was doing.

So, hat's off to Jake Demand and to all the other guys and gals out doing the dirty work that we sent them out to do. It's work I wouldn't wish on anyone, and yet they decided to do it freely. I think it deserves our support and respect.