Fire

So I'm working calmly in my house, and suddenly there is an excited voice outside my house, "Excuse me sir, there is a fire!" I am wondering what the hell is going on there so I see outside through the window and there is this excited girl in the middle of the street shouting there is a fire. So go outside and look at the house next to mine and indeed it is spewing thick smoke so I call 911. It seems their location system is screwed up since the woman asked me for the address thrice. By the time the fire trucks reached here, just another 5 or so minutes, the fire had gotten worse. It seemed to take them an eternity to get all the pipes around and they still hadn't started any fighting business and by then you could actually see flames shooting out of the house.
It took them around 7 hours to get things out. It was amazing watching them in action. The main truck had an extensible boom with 3 jets that were remotely controlled. They seemed to be obscenely powerful. When the first jet hit the roof it knocked it right off and parts of the roof sailed flaming down. The whole place seemed like a flood.

I had no idea a house fire could be this bad. When they reduced the fire from one side, it seemed to come ou the other. There was one truck randomly spraying water around. Possibly to keep the sparks down. Outside it seemed like rain on a clear day.

They said they'll be around until morning to make sure it doesn't flare up again.

Humans are crap at judging risk

Just what we knew.

Coolest presentation

Bar Scene also tired of area bachelor

Bar Scene Also Tired Of Area Bachelor

NEW YORK—Arguing that area bachelor Gary Tate, 34, is "becoming too old for this lifestyle," hundreds of representatives from the New York...

This post is mainly for the benefit of William :). I hung out with Pepke in real life last week. He is a great fellow to do so with.

Shymeet 2007

So the long awaited shymeet took place in Media, PA last weekend. Kim and Nick were wonderful hosts and provided accomodations for everyone and kept the alcohol flowing freely. I was, surprisingly, the first one to arrive, and then we all went to pick up urz at the airport. Urz arrived in style with a police escort which made it rather easy to spot him. Not too long after Jamison joined us and then catsup came by. Urz had brought his juggling balls and some tropical malady along with him.
Later in the day we went to Dave and Buster's where Larkin joined us. Next day Marsha joins us and single handedly ups the energy of the group considerably. She introduces letterboxing to us and that's what we do.


Once the letterboxing was over, Marsha showed us how to make a whistle using an acorn cap. Not to be outdone, urz then shows us how to make music with a vagina. Marsha tried to do the same but found that her vagina was too shallow to get the rich tones that urz was able to obtain with his. The rest of the time was spent playing mini-golf and then later that night in a drunken debauchery. More pics can be found here.

Area man

Area Man Has Sad Little Routine For When He Needs Cheering Up

TIPTON, IN—To raise his spirits, Wes Mendic holds a "mini-Thanksgiving," which consists of microwaved turkey medallions, canned cranberry sauce, and a paper plate.

Home improvement

Apparently home improvement doesn't work like they show in those reality TV shows. I am at my brother's place and thought that while I am there we could improve the place since he recently bought a house and it needs some upgrading. My plan was, we take the dining room and paint it and change the old carpet. So far so good.
There were some tapes covering up cracks and I decided that they should be done away with for a proper job. When we started removing the tapes, parts of wallpaper came off, so I thought we might as well do away with the wallpaper. Then, at some points, removing both caused the plaster to fall off. So we decided to take off the plaster where it was really damaged and put up drywall there.
The scope of the project was rapidly expanding. While removing stuff in the room we also noticed a piece of the carpet soaked and stained with cat pee that was covered with a mat.

Then I noticed that some of the ceiling tiles showed water damage and they were ugly anyway so why not see what's behind them.
We found some plastic covering the whole ceiling. Cutting through it, it looked like there was significant water damage at some point which was covered up by a false ceiling. We decided we could do away with the false ceiling and put up drywall (or plywood) and make it a better looking ceiling. I did not foresee how much our job would increase with that.

For some reason, there were insulating foam in the middle of the ceiling. Now all the plastic's gone and the wooden slats in one direction from the false ceiling are gone. Removing the rest of the wood doesn't look like its going to be easy. What I thought would be a 12 hr project seems to have turned into a 2 week or so project.

My first computer

A post on IIDB triggered a flood of memories about my first programming experiences. My first computer was a Casio PB-80 as shown below.


My father gave it to me when I was in the 4^th grade. This places this around 1986 or so. Apparently this was a rather limited release computer. It boasted 512 bytes of RAM (0.5 KB, 0.0005 MB) and a rather limited BASIC programming language. Despite the limitations I managed to get it to do an impressive range of things some of which were thought impossible by my dad. Kids in my school got officially introduced to computers in the 5th grade so this one-year headstart gave me massive number of nerdpoints and most of them bowed to my superior knowledge of all things computer related.

Among the things I managed to get it to do that it was never meant to were things like "animations" by rapidly placing different characters at the same spot to produce weird shapes. I used them for making action games figures though you needed a little imagination to play the game. I think me and my bro were the only ones to really get into it. The programming skills did come in handy on bigger machines though some habits I picked up were hard to lose like using only single character variables to save space and reusing variables as it allowed for only 26 variables.

We only got 2 hrs a week of actual "real computer" time in the school which had to be shared among so 6 or so kids so to maximize the use of that time I made shorter programs which I tested out on this beast. Eventually, in the next 3-4 years, the membrane keyboard started giving out. The shift key was the first to go. I tried to repair it with a separator piece of tape and some copper but it made things worse as often as it made them work. I never threw it away and I wonder if it is still at my home in my junk somewhere. I cried the day when I realized the shift key was definitely dead.

Scab picking gone bad

Scab picking gone bad, originally uploaded by RadsWiki.

Just when you think you've seen everything possible. This patient picked at forehead scab for a full year until she finally made it through her skull.

Weekly World News

Weekly World News is all set to close. What will we ever do now in lazy supermarket lanes?

White and Nerdy

Google sky

Another cool addition to Google Earth.

Coolest video

This is probably the coolest video video I have seen in years.

Now I am Sheik Yerbouti, PhD.

PICT0008

PICT0008, originally uploaded by sheik-yerbouti.

I made bread. Read the full saga here

Vouchsafe your Virginity

Vouchsafe your Virginity, originally uploaded by Solitaire Miles.

Just when you think you've seen everything. This is not a joke, it's real
www.abstinence.net/store/00464.html

nude

nude, originally uploaded by kdrs75.

Just a test post.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Kitty

Guess what's she thinking?

Heard on slashdot (about God)

He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out. --SatanicPuppy

I don't know why but the nose is just a tad disturbing.

Things not-so-easy to parody

Yesterday I was driving back from Pittsburgh and station surfing on the radio and I listened to one which sounded like a parody of a Christian radio station. There was a guy in a deep southern accent going on and on about how he had to do projects in school and while other people did stuff in science which required them to read lots of books all he had to do was buy a Holy Bible and once a year buy a LA Times paper to document all the 'sins of the flesh' in the modern world. It sounded fun the way he was going on about all that and then a commercial break came and all the ads for churches started and I realized that it wasn't a parody or anything, it was the real thing.

Lousy Day

I am going to complain about a day that deserves to be complained about.

Today was one of those days which is exhausting. Not the kind of exhausting where you have just accomplished something and can relax and look back at it, the kind of exhausting where all your resources, emotional and physical, have been drained, you have tried every option you knew of and some you didn't and you are still at square one.

I had replaced the distributor on a pickup truck. Now the timing was off so the engine wouldn't start. I had been assured it was almost right so I just had to turn it a little and it should be good to go. Apparently, that was easier said than done. I am sure the more astute members here will pick up something about the age of my truck from the aforementioned information. Anyway, it was well and truly stuck so it did not work. Taking it out took the better part of 5 hours. Then I followed the directions in a Chilton's to a T trying to put things back correct. Do tat all, and it almost, barely, imperceptibly started but no. So I turned it a little, and no response. A couple of hours of fighting with it and nothing. Just a dead truck and a beautiful sunset.

A bridge in California, reminds me of a certain Dali painting.

In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration. '
--My Life as a Quant, Emanuel Derman

Profound words. Depressing words.

Events in churches

A compilation of stuff that goes on in churches. The butt slap is very funny.

Random stuff

So a couple of weekends back I went to meet my bro in Pittsburgh and he let me take his pick-up truck. Wonderful gift as this city is horrible to live in without a way of getting around. Just around that time I had to give up hope of my roommate ever returning.

On 23rd March my roommate took off ostensibly for Chicago. At that point, I had no inkling that it might be the last time I ever saw him. Later that day, his girlfriend dropped by my house and asked for him. When I told her he'd left for Chicago she broke into tears and asked me if he was going to return. Well, I thought those were rather odd questions and told her of course he would return by Mar 30th and she ran off. Well, Mar 30th came and went, and no sign of him. Couldn't be reached by cellphone, didn't reply to email, people at his place of work thought he was in Denver and headed for Texas eventually. Of course, I discovered he hadn't signed the lease which he had promised to do so I could not hold him responsible legally. And apparently, the two utilities he had in his name were holding me responsible for the unpaid bills because regardless of whose name they were in since I am on the lease I am enjoying their use.

Yesterday, the truck I am using refuses to start. So I am trying and trying, and it isn't starting. So my neighbor is listening to me struggling and comes by and says, "My daughter says if you keep doing that you'll flood the engine and possibly damage it". So I am like, "Okay, does your daughter also know what to do?". She runs inside and asks her and comes back and says, maybe wait 30-45 minutes and try again. Well, then I stood looking at the truck and she asked me if I had to be somewhere and if they could give me a ride. I said thanks and took the offer. Turns out her daughter's just turned 19 and is a kind of taciturn girl. They got me halfway to school and I took a bus the rest of the way.

Well, I come back from school later at night and try starting the truck again and well no-go. It seemed possible that I had indeed flooded the engine so I tried the "Clear flood procedure" but again no go. I give up for the night and decide to tackle it later the next day. Next day, I read more on the problem online and discover that it may be that the spark plugs are covered with carbon and not firing properly. SO I open the hood and try to figure out where the spark plugs are. So my neighbor again comes out and asks if I figured out what was wrong, I said it may be the spark plugs and I am trying to figure out where they were. So she said maybe her daughter knows, and runs back inside. It is kind of funny having to go through the mom all the time. Anyway, te mom comes back out and in a conspiratorial whispering voice tells me how good her daughter is with mechanical stuff, and she took apart a lawnmower engine and put it back together when she was a kid I am like cool. Anyway, the she comes outside and takes a look at the truck and identifies the sparkplugs. The wires to the spark plugs turned out to be what I had thought were fuel lines.

Apparently, it turns out she, call her J, was quite an unusual girl. J was scheduled to go to a Lacrosse thing with her friends but she was overjoyed to have a reason to cancel that. Instead of going there, she was very happy to get her hands dirty and greasy tinkering with the truck. J also had an impressive tool-chest with which we took out all the spark plugs one-by-one, cleaned them and put them back in. Unfortunately, that did not do the trick. Then we got her car around and tried to jump start the truck but that did not work either. It was kind of funny watching the mom-daughter interactions. Her mom was hovering around and interrupting occasionally like, you are going to get your shirt dirty, and J seemed like she would just explode at some points if her mom tried to say one more thing about what she was doing. I could tell her the anger wasn't worth it but it would have been patronizing. When J went in to check something on the net, her mom told me that she's been rebelling and I told her that its good she's rebelling when its expected for her to do so rather than, say, in her late 30s. It seemed like she did not fully appreciate my wisdom.

Anyway, then she got some auto-mechanic on the phone and asked me to start the car while she put the phone near the engine and from the sound he diagnosed that it was a potential fuel pump problem. Very high-tech. Anyway, at that point it was getting dark so I closed up the hood and went back in.

Apparently, my roommate's mom finally responded and said that she was disappointed with her son's behavior and if I would tell her how much he owed me she would try to get that money to me as soon as she could. Wonderful news. I hope this actually goes through and I get the money back.

I am delighted to inform you that I have acquired a USB cable which directly connects my cell-phone to my comp. Thus, I can download images like the above without going through the Sprint Vision service. You can expect more such pics in the future. A free topless pic of mine to anyone who can identify the above pic :-)

Kid tells mom he is an atheist

Kid tells mom he is an atheist. Watch the love! The best part is when she tries to bribe him with Xmas gifts.

Sorry

I apologize for the unseasonal cold all over the midwestern US. My fridge door wasn't closed properly. Its been taken care of and things should be normal in a few days.

Fucking finicky felines

Given all the hyteria about pet food, I decided to get the more expensive kind of stuff for my kitty. I researched and got her a brand that did not have any animal by-products and stuff like that and made a gradual switch. And what do I get for all my troubles? She somehow managed to neatly eat only the kibble from her old food and leave the new premium food in a little pile in her little bowl on the other side. I have no idea how she managed to separate the two as I had mixed them well.

Ass physics

I never thought a term like this existed but physics has penetrated new fields. From this CNET article comes this quote:

Abram said that Virtually Jenna allows players to highly customize their characters, including giving those wanting men with different size genitalia the ability to get what they want.
The same goes for what Abram called "ass physics," essentially the firmness of the male buttocks.

While they are talking about male buttocks it seems to me that ass physics in the female shows more varied and complex behavior, the study of which could keep physicists busy for decades to come. While behaviour close to the equilibrium seems to be easily modeled with damped oscillatory equations and even driven behavior around that point is not so complex




But asses driven far from equilibrium show varied and interesting behavior.




Additional complications are introduced when you consider asses covered with thin wet gridlike networks of natural or artificial fibres. These need to be studied not only from a movement point of view but also the physics of how light behaves with these fibres when they are in touch with the underlying skin or not.


In conclusion, this newly observed phenomena needs to be deeply investigated by theoretical and experimental means. Massive interest shown by teenagers in this field could lead to a new generation of physicists and, maybe, even a couple of Nobel prizes.

You should've seen the one that got away

They've finally caught a collosal squid off New Zealand.

That thing is bigger than a double-decker bus. They said calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tires. I can't wait to see the plate that they are put in.

This reminds me of an incident an uncle of mine had at the US customs. During religious ceremonies, we eat on a large communal plate, sometimes large enough for 10-12 people to sit around it. Naturally, you don't get such a thing in the US, so this guy brought one from India. So he is going through customs and 3 guys are turning it over and looking from all sides. Its basically a flat stainless steel sheet with raised edges. Something like this, just a little larger,

So, finally, not being able to figure out its purpose, they just asked him, what is it, and he replies, "Oh, its a plate, for eating". So the customs guy's eyes nearly popped out and he says "Man, how much do you eat?"

Sleep

I can't sleep. :-( Weirdly, one of the things that scares me about sleeping is sleeping for too long. So I stay up thinking about not waking up in time, and then I sleep way late and wake up way late. And the cycle goes on.

Weird cab ride

Due to a fuck-up with the university's escort service, I was left out in the cold at 1 in the night and not wanting to wait another hour or so, or walk in the -10F cold, I decided to take a cab. Now I am used to inane chatter with cabbies but this one turned out to be different. After getting where I wanted to go and how, he suddenly asks me, "Do you know Maxwell?".
I am like "Maxwell who".
"Maxwell of the equations"
"Of course, how do you know him?"
"Same way as you know him"

For a moment I wonder if he's a physics PhD, I have run into them at strange places but then he smiles and says he is trying to get to be a radiology tech or something but he needs to save up money before he can do that. Then he asks me if I am from Bombay. This is uncannily accurate, though it may just be that that's the only city in India he knew. (He said he is from Mauritania). So I asked him if he watched Hindi movies. And he sang a few songs from some 90's movies surprisingly fluently but with a little accent. Turned out that he couldn't understand them much, but he had enough of a memory to remember them verbatim. He asked me about my research and then he said he had studied a little programming. He asked me if I was married, and I was like, is this a extended pickup attempt, but then he said that he was (after I told him I wasn't), and his wife also wanted to study more so they were delaying kids. And that was when we reached my home.

All in all, the conversation left me a little sad. The guy seemed overtly happy and funny, but there was something a little forced about it. It was as if he was a disappointed at where he found himself at that juncture in life. And then I thought about the kids I teach who smetimes want to know how every little equation they know is going to help them be a lawyer or whatever and it depressed me further thinking how vast the difference in opportunities could be just depending on where you happen to be born and to whom.

Blame Canada

Its brutal out there and I blame Canada (and also Michigan).

Goatse-in-the-sky

Some people have suggested that this goatse in the sky is proof of God.

I have to get away from this city. The brightest comet ever in my lifetime graces this hemisphere and I cannot see the sky for 4 days straight. I envy all you people with clear skies.

From the fine programmers at SUN

I was holding back on installing Google Desktop for a long time worried about privacy and such things but then it came as an add-on to a Java update so I let it install. Once it had finished indexing the system, I decided to do the right thing and searched for 'fuck' on my laptop. And where do I find it? In Java/jdk1.5.0_04/src.zip/com/sun/org/
apache/xalan/internal/xsltc/dom/BitArray.java


.
.
}

/**
* This method returns the Nth bit that is set in the bit array. The
* current position is cached in the following 4 variables and will
* help speed up a sequence of next() call in an index iterator. This
* method is a mess, but it is fast and it works, so don't fuck with it.
*/
private int _pos = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
.
.



My cursory examination of Linux code says there is a lot more profanity in there.