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| Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | | 1:29 pm |
The Dow....
It's over niiine thousaaaaaand! Current Mood:  amused | | Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | | 12:08 am |
just in case
The president ever was kidnapped by ninjas, I am totally a bad enough dude to rescue him. | | Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | | 9:02 pm |
shivering
........................................ ..........pation. Current Mood: happy | | Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | | 8:27 pm |
Is there such a thing as a Rick Astley impersonator?
I was thinking, the next time I have to give a science talk, I'd get them to wait behind a curtain or something......then begin with the first slide in my talk and right when people thought they knew what was coming for the next few minutes, I'd duck behind the podium and.......well..... | | Friday, October 24th, 2008 | | 1:52 am |
vegan thesis, dresden antithesis, sin-thesis.
Sitting in the Dresden congress-center, listening to a talk about the LHC by dr. Engelen from CERN. It turns out that helium gets into the darndest places, but then again, anyone who's been to the beach will already know that. And, by "beach," I mean ultracold, synthetic environments, inside a lab, and under high vacuum.. So, really, the perfect opposite of the beach. If you have been to the beach, consider the exact opposite of that experience, with yourself as a massless, zero-dimensional test object. So, naturally, you'd expect a helium containment leak due to electrical fault. I mean, obviously.
The internet lies and there is no "vegan" in east Germany. The use of meat and cheese here, frankly, elevates meals here to a kind of ecstatic exhaltation of the substances. The phrase "they eat meat and cheese a lot here" doesn't begin to cover the nature of the practice. Of course they eat meat and cheese, but it's more accurate to say that meat and cheese are their medium. It's like some kind of goddamned church of animal products over here, only with the holy eucharist replaced with an actual dead body, and the baptismal font filled with a foul mixture of rich cream cheese and bacon grease. Thus, as predicted in the book of revelation, those without the unholy mark of the meatLord must wander the streets, unable to buy food and starving like reviled, hungry dogs. After days of missing lunch and dinner, ekeing out a few calories in the morning by way of a bowlful of nuts and seeds at the hotel (in lieu of the english acre of offered cold cuts and cheeses), my love the 'quark and I were "treated" to a lavish reception at the conference consisting (I am not exaggerating) of fish, other seafood, a kind of seafood-curry chowder, cream puffs, cream-based desserts, and NOT A DAMNED THING a vegan could eat, with the possible exception of questionable bread. After this, the laboratory "horde" was going out to our customary dinner, which turned out to be - wait for it - at a place with not a *single* meal not based on meat or cheese. Not a place where substitutions could be made, you understand, but where menu choices like "venison in sauce over potatoes" played alongside "platter of imported cheeses," vying for "impossible to veganize" champion. And - I gave up. I ordered meat. I ordered chocolate fondue. I ordered soup with sausage. I ate until I felt poisoned by it, which, as it turns out, didn't take long at all. So, here's an interesting point - as a vegan, I have been given nifty vegan powers. I can stay up late, drink a gallon of beer, work until the dawn, then get up in an hour and do wind-sprints without my body throwing an alarm. For my daily life, these powers combine to create voltron significant benefits for me, and I had gotten used to it. So when I say that I passed out without any conscious control on my part, and couldn't get up on time the next day, and when I tell you that I felt sicker than I have been in recent memory, I want you to understand my full meaning. So, screw it. I can't go back. I want my body to work like the high-octane machine it's become, and if that means eating a pile of nuts and seeds to stay alive for another few days, you can call me a freakin' gold finch. Chirp, everyone. Chirp. Current Mood: contrite | | Monday, August 25th, 2008 | | 11:29 am |
yellow 6, standing by
Janet, over radio: "Mobile 1, no alarm registered in detector" Tracy, over radio: "Mobile 2, confirm no alarm" Me, over radio: Mobi.....um....I'm not sure that I have a name, but I'm reading no spectroscopics..." ..... ..... Janet, over radio: "Mobile Command Center is what you are, Sean." Me, over radio: "......oh." | | Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | | 7:30 pm |
| | Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 | | 1:39 pm |
Fly on the wall
Me, standing in front of a blackboard, pen in hand: "As you can see, we can make an estimate of the atomic weight of the intervening material here, and once we have that, it gives an estimate for the total density, which is sensitive, up until the high densities where the material is totally black to gammas. In that region, we can't really make a good estimate, since once you go black, you can never go back.." And only like *one* person even snickered. | | Monday, January 28th, 2008 | | 9:29 pm |
I guess I'm back
Well, I'm suffering from the aftermath of acute caffeine overdose, and my CNS is all shot to hell. I drove for about 9 hours last night, and I've noticed that every time I'm in Seattle and Snoqualmie pass is full, and I decide to take the Columbia River Gorge through Oregon instead, it is somehow the "storm of the season" and I almost die somehow. | | Monday, July 23rd, 2007 | | 1:41 pm |
plant face
So, it's good to know that training still hangs around a while after the trainee has stopped actively partaking. I got out of my car last night at a gas station, and realized that I needed to feed the car some oil, such that it might be mysteriously consumed by the oil-eating demons living under the hood. Taking off from the pump at a full-tilt run toward the convenience store attached to the gas station, I passed the second pump and clipped the metal stand one of those freestanding signs with my right foot, sending me into a nose dive into the pavement at full running speed. And then I was upright, walking toward the mini-mart again. In reconstruction, I had put the ball of my right foot back on the ground and purposefully launched my legs such that I hit the ground in "rolling" posture, and pulled myself through "zenpo kaiten," after whch I came right back up. Didn't feel a thing. If actually called upon to do such a thing, I might reasonably balk at it, due to my lack of practice, and the overall hardness of concrete and velocity one accumulates while falling toward it. But, while forced, the training seems to make unlikely things like that possible. Current Mood:  contemplative | | Thursday, July 19th, 2007 | | 10:04 am |
Dr and the Hobo
So...I was bitten by a Hobo spider, so I believe - while riding, I felt an extremely sharp pain on my left calf, which upon inspection revealed a painful red bump. I was unable to find a spider within my pants, and turned therefore back to biking. Had I but considered the situation, I'd have remembered that the wave function of a spider diffuses very quickly over time, and so the spider "event" I had just observed, coupled with the non-observation of a spider, was completely plausible in a spider-present scenario. The cross section of my leg presented to a nonuniform spider flux was tested again, as I felt another bite just behind my left knee. Now, part of my job deals with pattern recognition......so......let's just say that I made a linear extrapolation. To make a long story short, I ran around in public for awhile with no pants on, screaming and jumping around. Except for the part about screaming, I made that up. The emergency room put me on an antibiotic for a secondary staph infection, so if you have any spare "juice" lying around, I'd appreciate it if you sent me a thought. I think I'll be okay though, since antibiotics kick the crap out of my "healing trance." My healing trance is a total wuss compared to modern pharmaceutical biochemistry. | | Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 | | 9:42 am |
Blog of eternal stench
Okay, so, I'm literally just posting to do something with the blog again. Thus, this is a placeholder and doesn't serve any real purpose. | | Thursday, March 8th, 2007 | | 4:58 pm |
on vacation
I'll see you all when I get back from Japan. (and, since I haven't mentioned it on my LJ yet, "surprise, I'm going to japan." Also I'm visiting Jon.) We're going to be attending (among other things) a festivel around gifu, which I am told is roughly translated as the "penis festival." Wish us luck. :) | | Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 | | 3:24 pm |
Iteratively reweighted least squares
So, it turns out that when you're doing scientific work, and you need to make sure you do a mathematical problem correctly, and so round up a room full of mathematicians to explain the ideal way to solve a problem..... They do! Seriously, this was an enormous shock. There I was, thinking "well, I'll just write the likelihood function, and then iterate over the parameter space, or maybe use an annealing method, blah blah blah," and they schooled me on the analytical poisson likelihood maximization method to the point where I now realize it can be done analytically, right down to the hessian matrix. Wow, is my face red. Okay, seriously though, I'm probably actually going to use IRLS, like the title line says, because my math still sucks, and I don't actually have the money to have my room full of "reweighted squares" around all the time. :( Indeed, I'm now going to consider "room full of mathematicians" a special skill that I can call upon once I've built up my "energy" bar far enough by hammering away at the "x" button until the level rises. "what are you doing?" "almost...got it....this is the only way to get past the stage 4 miniboss..." "is that why you're bashing away on that controller?" "yeah....I....got it!!" Room full of mathematicians!!!! *cool music and FMV* "Sweet!" "Okay, I'll go get coffee and be back. Room full of mathematicians is the longest summon in the game..." | | Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 | | 10:30 am |
got bent
I have a Hurricane Short Wheelbase understeering recumbent now. Just as soon as my legs stop cramping and cars stop driving over me, I'll totally be a traffic nuisance - in ur lane, wreckin' ur moodz. | | Thursday, January 4th, 2007 | | 11:35 am |
Thai one
*Me, clutching at my stomach* - "The spice is life! He who controls the spice controls the universe!" *Jenny* - "okay, next time? Medium." | | Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 | | 3:54 pm |
Repeal Day
Happy Repeal Day, all of you living in the US. Go have a fifth. | | Monday, November 27th, 2006 | | 1:58 pm |
To remember
I had a long series of dreams last night in which I was shown in excruciatingly exact detail the proper technique to be used, by which to gain knowledge and therefore control over known objects and systems, physical and conceptual, for the furtherance of understanding of these subjects. Unfortunately, given the interplay between the tenuousness of dream memory and the difficulty I have in committing such memories to paper upon awakening, I have only the most rudimentary advice left, which might nonetheless prove useful: In order to obtain knowledge of a thing, whereby a level of control may be leveraged, meditate fully on what is the thing and what is not the thing, or, to put it another way, think clearly about the thing and its opposite, for a specified time, until these dissimilar elements should become one thing in your understanding, at which time your knowledge of the thing will have progressed substantially. As a footnote, let the reader beware that my recent reading of H.P.Loveraft's The Lurker at the Threchold may have somewhat influenced my choice of phrase here. I promise to be "back to normal" as soon as it is reaonably possible. | | 1:26 pm |
93 pieces of not pork
Hi everyone, sorry I've been impossible to get ahold of for a little while. There was the matter of Thanksgiving, and also my sister gave birth immediately thereafter, which went well. Speaking of which, while momentarily stopping in the waiting room outside the delivery area, I had opportunity to glance upon some of those "celebrity magazines" that are frequently made available in waiting rooms, medical "patient staging areas," and generally anywhere the threat of imminent physical pain upon being led to an interior office might be lessened by first reading such a publication, and then making onesself happy that, although the pain might be great, it was still lessened somewhat by the fact that one was no longer forced to read about the insipid antics of rich and distant idiots. In this case, the front page featured the familiar vacant stare of a popular starlet whose name escapes me. Yet the interesting thing about this cover wasn't so much the stories promised within, but the fact that someone, likely some enterprising young child, had upon the forehead of the woman drawn a scrawl, which bore the seemingly random, "abstract" flair of someone writing while thinking on another subject, and yet simultaneously expressed a kind of geometric preciseness. In short, it was a simple polygon, with one line somewhat "doubled." A simple triangle was printed in the middle of the woman's forehead, point up, with a second line drawn through horizontally, somewhere around the middle. In short, it was precisely the following figure:  Now, the interaction of opportunistic symbol writing, delivery waiting rooms, and knowledge of classical symbology is so small that I actually believe this symbol was written as abstract, the implied joke entirely foreign to its author. And that's about the funniest thing that has happened in recent memory. | | Thursday, September 21st, 2006 | | 1:08 pm |
Memoirs of a pushover
Hi all, As any of you who know me in person can attest, I have a very hard time saying "no" to offers placed in front of me. This issue permeates every part of my decision to buy (or even obtain)anything, to the extent that I avoid actual salespeople like the plague. The bubonic...plague. Which is deadly. However, there are times when contact is unavoidable. Most notably, a steady trickle of telemarketers, missionaries, and door-to-door salespeople had gradually filtered into my abode and robbed me blind in the distant past, until I got my act together. You see, just as it is the physical appearance of spiders that carries the "terror" characteristic of arachnophobia, so it is the exact act of saying "no" to an offer which carries the psychological aversion. Saying "no," to my upbringing, implies conflict, as if I were the one upsetting the natural order of things. It also elicits a "talking into" reaction from salespeople good and otherwise, as that is their primary function, whatever they may tell you. The upshot of the above is this: I am quite capable of saying or doing almost anything which is *not* a "no", on the face of it, or to say "no" a single time, when the battle is mostly won. And, one of the best approaches to accomplish this (in my opinion) is the "crazy flying nutcakes" tactic. This includes making ridiculous demands of the salesperson, purposefully misinterpreting things until they go away, or otherwise scaring them into leaving you alone. A few examples: salesperson: You really do need this, it's hard to be informed today without a good newspaper subscription... me: But what does that have to do with eating fish? salesperson: Well, um...nothing. Fish? me: Yeah, you were mentioning fish, and now I'm confused. salesperson: When did I mention fish? me: Just a second ago, when you said "Fish?" to me and I thought you were talking about newspapers. Anyway, I dont' really like fish, so... salesperson: no, there aren't any fish. The newspaper - me: And yet you keep talking about fish - there, you just did it again! I really dont' know where you're going with this. Anyway, I really don't need a newspaper. salesperson: Well I....okay. Of greater effectiveness (though dubious legality) is the "as long as I can..." or "as long as you will" approach, which has been known to work on missionaries. Observe: missionaries: Have you heard about god? We'd like to talk to you about god. me: Okay, but you'd better come in. And take your clothes off - everyone has to take their clothes off to come in. missionaries: we...we really can't do that. It's against the principles of holiness...(or something like this). me: Well, okay, if you don't want to, but do let me know if you change your mind someday. missionaries: o.....kay. (this seems to elecit a look somewhere between disbelief, intrigue, and relief). And if all else fails, the absolute piece-of-resistance might well lie in the "I'm a flying hoopty-bird-of-insanity and I had an extra bowl of crazy-o's for breakfast" defense: Person Of Interest on the Phone: We have a wide variety of cell phone plans for you to choose from, so would you like the most expensive one, or the second most - me: Woohah! Your mother flies the canadian kite! My pants betray me! POIP: (clearly reading) But think of all the options available to you. We have weekend plans which... me: Weekends are for sacrificing the cat! Surely the cat can wait, though. Cats made baby Jesus cry, and who are you to say different? POIP: okay, we're sorry you don't want our product today. If we can serve you in the future, please call - me: But wait, the martian archipelago nears its perigee! We must save the velvet Elvis paintings, for the good of - POIP: dial toooone........ Over the years, I've used all of these, with varying degrees of success, so they might come in handy.... |
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