Access An Electronic Book Via Dahlgren Memorial Library

Let’s say you wanted to access a book electronically via Dahlgren Memorial Library. Assuming that the book is indeed available electronically, here’s how you do it. For the sake of example, let’s say you wanted to access Cody and Pass’ SAS Programming By Example.

1. Go to the Dahlgren Memorial Library web page.




2. Click on the link Catalog – Find Books.




3. Type “SAS Programming by Example” into the search box, and change “Any Field” to “TITLE”.




4. Click on the “Submit” button.




5. Click on the link “Connect to Online Resource.”

The Home Stretch

I will be busy doing schoolwork the next few weeks: my Statistical Consulting class will have a “consultation memo” due Monday, which is simply a short summary of an actual statistical consult we students sat in on this past Monday. And on Tuesday I have to give a presentation for my Case Studies in Bioinformatics class. There are only two students in this class, and each of us needs to present an analysis of some 2D protein gel electrophoresis data.

There will be a few more hurdles, but I am rapidly approaching the end of my studies in the Master’s program. On Monday, I will be one of the designated two “head students” for the consult; as we sit in on an actual statistical consultation another student and I will sit closest to the consultation, and each of us will be responsible for giving a short presentation on the consultation the following Thursday.

On December 8, I need to give a presentation discussing/critiquing this paper; the teacher (who happens to be the head of the department) also requires a 3-5 page write-up. And December 14 is the deadline for a take-home exam for the Consulting class.

And of course there’s the big T. (Working title: Non-negative Matrix Factorization: Assessing Methods for Normalization and for Estimating the Number of Components.) In about a week, I must submit an advance copy of my thesis to my thesis committee; this means that the document must be in a presentable form by that time. (Not to worry, I think everything is falling into place.) Because of a departmental requirement, I have written my thesis in LaTeX. And on December 10, I need to defend the thesis, which means I need to compose a PowerPoint presentation for that day.

Whew! It seems like a lot. But I’m really coming into the home stretch here.

The Trap of the Middle Way

I mentioned earlier that L. LeShan warned (p. 65) that there are special traps associated with what he calls the “Middle Way” approach to meditation, also called “the way of the man with a silent mind” of the Hesychast tradition of Mount Athos or “the way of emptiness.” He points to an entire chapter in his book entitled Alluring Traps in Meditation and Mysticism (p.116). But nowhere in that chapter does he specify what the special traps associated with the Middle Way are.

He lists several categories:

1. “Vibrations,” “Energy,” and Other Cheap Explanations of Things

2. Monday is Blue, Is Subatomic, Is Regressive, and Other Silly Maps of Reality

3. The Game of Withdrawal from the World (or, “I am such a high person that I can see that your pain is illusion”)

4. My Guru is Higher Than Your Guru

Of these three, my guess is that trap #3 is the one that is most likely to pertain to the Middle Way. On p. 128, LeShan writes that practitioners of a certain type (perhaps Middle Way?) of meditation

… turned out to be calm, centered, intelligent philosophers who could watch starvation and avoid involvement with those starving, since they believed involvement would bing them more closely to the “wheel of things” and so prevent their inner development.

Maybe this is one of the traps of the Middle Way?

---

Another possible trap is as follows. There may be TWO states of mind that are devoid of internal verbalization/conscious thought:

1. A state which LeShan describes as “a highly alert and dynamically balanced mind without conscious thought,” in which “events are perceived and responded to as they occur with the full focus of immediate attention…” This is the ideal.

2. A “spaced out” state in which there are no particular thoughts, but in which there is also little attention or alertness. This is not ideal.

It may be possible to attain state #2 but mistakenly believe that one had attained state #1. In state #2 the mind is indeed empty, but it is not alert. Perhaps the Middle Way should be renamed “the way of the man with a silent and alert mind” or “the way of emptiness and alertness.”

I can easily see somebody falling into this trap for years.

Obtain a Paper Electronically from Dahlgren Memorial Library

Let’s say you wanted to obtain a copy of this (infamous) paper.

1. Go to the Dahlgren Memorial Library web page.




2. Click on the link “Journal Finder”.




3. Type “Nature” into the search box.




4. Since “Nature” is a common word in journal titles, you’ll get too many hits if you do an unconstrained search. So, change the selection box “Partial Words” to “Exact Phrase”.




5. Click on the “Search” button.




6. Under “Full Text Access”, click any of the little icons that look like a check mark. I’d say go to the one corresponding to “Publisher”. This should bring you to the website of the publisher of the journal Nature.




7. Go to the link labeled “Archive” and look for the article there.

PubMed Search

Let’s say you wanted to a PubMed search for articles about “transcendental medicine”. To search for articles in which this term occurs in the title, do this PubMed search:

     transcendental medicine [ti]

Hmm, no articles were found at the time I did this search. Maybe search for this term in either the title or the abstract:

     transcendental medicine [tiab]

Still nothing. Maybe there are no articles published on PubMed on this topic.

---

Or suppose you wanted to search for papers by author J. Smith. You could do the following search:

     smith j [au]

Since there are many authors whose first name began with “J” and whose last name was “Smith”, there are many hits. To restrict the list to only those papers where J. Smith was the first author, use the [1au] tag instead:

     smith j [1au]

There are still many hits. To further restrict the search to first author J. Smiths from Georgetown University, try this search:

     smith j [1au] AND georgetown [ad]

which demonstrates a boolean expression. To search for first author J. Smiths from either Georgetown University or Yale University, try this search:

     smith j [1au] AND ( georgetown [ad] OR yale [ad] )

which demonstrates the boolean OR and the use of parentheses. Boolean NOT also works, but I don’t use it so often.

---

Here are the search tags that I use most frequently, roughly ordered from most- to least-frequently used.

Tag	Function
au	Author
1au	First Author
ti	in Title
tiab	in Title or Abstract
ta	in Journal; you can use the officially recognized abbreviations, e.g. you can use either “Human Brain Mapping” or “hum brain mapp”
dp	Date of Publication; e.g. 2009 [dp] for papers published in 2009, or 2009/2 [dp] for papers published in February, 2009
vi	in Volume (I remember this because of the vi text editor)
ip	in Issue (I remember this because of IP addresses)
pg	in Page

---

Searching PubMed

JSTOR Search

1. Go to Lauinger Library’s website, and click on the link labeled Articles and Databases; then click on the JSTOR link.




2. On JSTOR, do a search for “transcendental medicine” (yes, including the double quotes). This should yield about a dozen hits.




3. Right-click on the title of one of the articles, e.g. right-click on the word “Wonders” (article #6 in my search results). Select “Open Link in New Tab”. (Depending on your browser, you might not be able to do this, in which case you might have to open in a new window, or even just single-click on the link.)




4. In the new tab, click on the link labeled “View list of pages with search term(s)”. This should make a list of pages in which “transcendental medicine” occurred; click on one of these pages. In the “Wonders” article, only one page (page 25) has the words “transcendental medicine”.




5. JSTOR should show you the page where “transcendental medicine” occurred, and it should highlight the search words in yellow. In the “Wonders” article, we catch only the last half of the sentence; to see the first half of the sentence, click on the gold-colored bar to the left of the page to go back one page.




6. If you’re interested in the article, single-click on the link labeled PDF.




7. If you repeat the above steps for several articles and look at the sentences in which “trancendental medicine” occurred, you’ll see evidence that “transcendental medicine” had something to do with a mystical movement, and with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

---

Earlier post on JSTOR.

Monterrey, México, August 17, 2009

In the morning, I split a sandwich (pavo y queso, if I remember correctly) at Starbucks with B.O. Then we visited the mountain-top Sanctuario of Schoenstatt. The road to the top of the mountain gradually became rougher and rougher, eventually becoming a gravel road, and then becoming a dirt road.

Here is a nice photo that B.O. took last year (26 May 2009) of the chapel. It looks like a scene out of a fairy tale.

Chapel of the Sanctuario de Schoenstatt

B.O. suggested I go over the crest of the mountain. On the city-side of the mountain, you could hear the city noise. But on the opposite side of the mountain where the chapel sits, it is quiet; peaceful; meditative.

Mountain-Top View from the Sanctuario (I)

Mountain-Top View from the Sanctuario (II)

Mountain-Top View from the Sanctuario (III)

Mountain-Top View from the Sanctuario (IV)

Vegetation at the Sanctuario (I)

Vegetation at the Sanctuario (II)

Me at the Chapel of the Sanctuario de Schoenstatt

Chapel of the Sanctuario de Schoenstatt (interior)

B.O. and Me at the Chapel of the Sanctuario de Schoenstatt

---

Then B.O. took me to the airport, and I returned to D.C.

Monterrey, México, August 16, 2009

B.O. first took me to Soriana to buy new rubber sandals, since I had lost mine somewhere along the way (probably in the transfer from Hotel Ibis to B.O.’s parents’ house).

Afterwards, we stopped by OXXO, where I bought a chicken salad sandwich.

The Sandwich From OXXO

We split the sandwich as a light snack on the road, and we also snacked on tuna (the cactus fruit, not the fish).

---

After a while, we arrived to the Termas de San Joaquín (San Joaquín Hot Springs). A bath house was built around natural hot springs; it was essentially a shallow swimming pool, with the water coming up to about waist level. There was a distinct sulfurous smell.

Lantern In The Spiral Ramp

Passageway

B.O. and Me At The Termas

---

We returned to Monterrey, and had a late lunch at the house of B.O.’s brother E., the father of little V. who was shown taking a swing at the piñata on August 14. who served us a gourmet Italian meal that he cooked himself. Also at the table were E.’s wife N., and his two daughters M.A. (whom we have seen earlier) and little V.

---

In the evening, we went to the Mall Valle Oriente, where I bought a tie at Scappino, and then stopped by Sanborn’s and had coffee. Afterwards, we saw the new G.I. Joe movie in a very fancy theatre at V.I.P. Cinépolis. Waitstaff is present so you can order out of a menu, and you can then have a meal (B.O. mentioned sushi as a possibility) while you watch the movie; but we didn’t order anything.

Here are some photos of the interior of the V.I.P. theater.

V.I.P. Cinépolis Theatre

---

V.I.P. Cinépolis Seat (Close Up)

V.I.P. Menu (food and drinks)

---

Finally, we had a late meal at Super Salads.

---

Trip Summary

Monterrey, México, August 15, 2009

Apparently my clothes didn’t fit me that well. So B.O. took me to a tailor that she has used for years, Don Alejo, and had three of my shirts and the pants for my two-piece suit adjusted. Don Alejo had the adjustments done in time for the wedding later that day!

Camisa:

Cuello	15½”
Manga	31″
Talla	36″

Here’s a picture of Don Alejo’s shop (sastrería). That’s B.O.’s car on the right; B.O. is sitting at the wheel.

Don Alejo's Shop

Don Alejo and Me

---

I had packed a bunch of dark socks. But I hadn’t brought any dress socks, figuring that I could get away with wearing non-dressy dark socks at the wedding and reception. After all, when was the last time that anybody paid attention to the socks I was wearing?

I also hadn’t brought a white undershirt, and B.O. said that wearing a white dress shirt without an undershirt was a social blunder. I guess I have to believe her.

B.O.’s sister, D., went out shopping and bought me a pair of dark dress socks and a white undershirt to wear to the wedding. Thanks, D.!!

---

B.O. and I then went shopping for men’s clothing at La Argentina.

B.O. and Me at La Argentina

Afterwards, we had lunch at Sanborn’s.

When we got home, B.O.’s nephew R. and his band were practicing some music (some of which they had composed themselves).

R. And His Band

---

Soon after, we attended N.V. and R.C.’s wedding. The priest was Fr. Didier Marie Dugas; it was interesting to hear Spanish spoken with a French accent!

B.O. had the responsibility of making sure that small bells and bubble blowers were handed out as wedding favors. We left early to get to the reception hall, because B.O. was helping make arrangements there, too. I helped show guests to their tables; I am sure that many were wondering what an Asian guy was doing there at the reception.

The reception was held in the Salón Royal. The reception for another wedding was being held simultaneously in a nearby room across the hall.

Salón Royal (Lintel)

Salón Royal (second doorway)

Display Table

Guest Book

Wedding Cake

Bride and Groom's Table

S2, R, N, I., S., and B.O.

R.C., N.V., B.O., and Me

Here’s a photo that came out with an interesting, ghostly effect — an accidental double exposure.

Frolicking Men

---

Towards the end of the reception dinner, B.O. noticed that three women sitting to my right were sitting quietly, staring intently at their desserts but without touching them. B.O. was wondering, why aren’t they eating their desserts? Then she remembered: these three women were N.V.’s co-workers at Quitakilos, whose mission is to offer healthy food. (The name Quitakilos translates, roughly, to “Shed Pounds”; recall that B.O. and I ate at a Quitakilos location on August 11.) None of the three women wanted to be the first to touch her dessert, because each knew that her co-workers were watching.

This was a classic Mexican Standoff!

(Here is a famous Mexican standoff in film.)

---

After our reception was coming to a close, B.O. and I noticed a mariachi band assembling outside the reception room for the other wedding. I quickly had a photo taken with the mariachi band; seconds later, they marched into the room and began playing music.

Me With Mariachi Band

---

Trip Summary

Monterrey, México, August 14, 2009

I checked out of Hotel Ibis in the morning, and for the rest of the trip I spent the nights at B.O.’s family’s house as their guest. Somehow, in the move I lost my beach sandals.

In the morning, we split a sandwich (I think it was queso y puerco) from OXXO as a light snack on the road, and drove to Coahuila state, to see the Museo de las Aves. Yes, it was a museum that was devoted exclusively to the birds of México; there were many fine specimens of birds were on display in various dramatic poses. There was a map at the museum that showed the various climates of México. It showed that Monterrey is in a temperate forested clime, not out in the desert.

Me With Display of Stuffed Ostrich

Something that I got to wondering was, when a taxidermist is presented with a dead bird to mount for display, how do they decide what pose to put the bird in?

B.O. and Me at Museo de las Aves

Comparing Crocs at Museo de las Aves

After the Museo, we visited B.O.’s friend V. in Saltillo, which is the capital of Coahuila. We didn’t stay long, since we needed to get back to Monterrey for dinner.

---

On the way back, we bought a braid of garlic (ajos) from a roadside vendor. The sign behind us indicates two local towns, Los Fierros and Rinconada; the vendor was from Rinconada.

Garlic Vendor and Me

Garlic Braids

B.O. has a ceramic container at home which she can use to roast the garlic. Roasted garlic — sounds delicious!

Roadside Landscape

---

In the evening, I attended the weekly dinner of B.O.’s extended family. About 24 people were present. This photos is a little underexposed, but it gives a flavor of the setting.

Family Dinner

Dinner was tostitacos, which looked like tacos in a red shell. B.O. assured me that this was the meal that they always had (i.e., they didn’t make a special meal just because I was visiting).

After dinner they threw a birthday party for me (although it wasn’t really my birthday), complete with birthday cake, to show me what their birthday parties are like. They give each birthday party a theme according to the particular celebrant’s in-jokes, personality, and history. In my case, the motif was Mr. Spock, which is a reference to an in-joke that B.O. and I have that I am very Vulcan. B.O.’s sister E. had spent a lot of time making cute table decorations; you can see one on the table in the foreground, in the photo above. They presented me with some birthday gifts, and then I showed them some old movies of my own family from the 70’s and 80’s.

Here are two of B.O.’s nieces.

M. and M.A.

Here’s B.O.’s nephew.

R. At The Computer

B.O.’s family had gone so far as to have a piñata custom made in the image of Mr. Spock.

Revellers and Piñata

Apparently, this helped drum up a little business for the piñata maker. I was told that two other customers saw the Spock piñata, and asked the piñata maker to make one for them, too.

The convention is that the celebrant gets the first swings at the piñata. But if the celebrant is an adult they take only “light” swings at the piñata without breaking it, to allow the children to take “real” swings. In any case, the piñata was surprisingly well-made, and didn’t break very easily (this one was not filled with anything).

Here’s A. taking a swing at the piñata. She is wearing her Snow White costume.

A. Having At It

And here’s little V. taking a swing (with a little help from her father, B.O.’s brother E.):

V. Taking A Swing

According to this web page, the traditional piñata is shaped like a seven-pointed star to represent the Devil and the Seven Deadly Sins. So hitting it with a stick is symbolic of fighting evil.

---

Trip Summary