Cheek fist

Perhaps a fraction of you few readers notices the times at which I post my entries. If you do, you're probably a little suspicious of how I pass my time (well, lets face it, you're probably all a little suspicious of that). As a grad student, I am indentured to my advisor, especially over the summer where I don't have other things like classes to occupy my time (and mind). Yet many of my recent posts have been at times when I should be on campus, slaving away for my advisor.

Little do you know! I AM at work! And despite the fact that I'm typing up this entry right now, I'm actually performing work too. Multi-tasking? Suuure.

I'm doing remote sensing research right now. I'm investigating the feasibility of using hyperspectral AVIRIS imagery to map invasive species. More specifically, I'm trying to detect Tamarix species in Arizona. I'm also supposed to be looking for a mustard species, but it was all dead and very sparse at the time the image was taken, so it's indistinguishable from sand. C'est la vie. Or maybe I mean c'est la morte? (and since I don't speak french, I'm sure there are many, many problems with that last statement. gender and spelling being top on my list). So anyway, all this remote sensing stuff requires a lot of sitting around while the computer processes something. So that's what I'm doing right now =D. During these times, I generally read textbooks or journal articles and check my email compulsively. But occasionally, just occasionally, I actually have something potentially interesting (or at least not super dull) on my mind and write up my musings for you guys! Like right now!

I'm in the middle of reading a journal article. A rather poorly edited one, which is why I felt motivated to update my weblog. It's kind of funny. It seems obvious that it was scanned from an original manuscript, and then converted to a write-access kind of file (just like I don't speak french, I also don't speak computer =) ) using one of those text recognition programs. Do any text recognition programs really work? I mean, sure, they all seem to do their job reasonably well, but there are a couple letters and more typically letter combinations that they reliably screw up. I see it a lot when I try to read abstracts of journal articles that have been uploaded to online databases. The funniest typo (or perhaps it should be called a scano?) that I've come across so far in this article is "cheek fist". Can you guess what it's meant to be? I bet you can't!!! Oh, it'll be obvious when I tell you. Just as it's obvious from the context. What's weird is that the phrase is reported correctly at least three other times in the paragraph alone. So why should it get it right most of the time, but let slip with "cheek fist" this once? Maybe that's the fault of leaky editors rather than sloppy text recognizers? Hmmmm. Anyway, here you go! The moment I'm sure you've been waiting for... Cheek fist is actually supposed to be "check list". Yeah. Makes much more sense. Though isn't remotely as interesting =D.

Ok... I'd better get back to reading this journal article and compulsively checking my email. I'll be sure to keep you posted on any more interesting scanos!

(by the way, my process is now 19% completed! It was at maybe 10% when I started writing this entry. Unfortunately, this is a 3 part process, and this is only 19% of the first part. And the third part is the really slow one...)