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.

Area Man Has Naked-Lady Fetish

ST. JOHNSBURY, VT-Warren Geary derives pleasure and sexual stimulation from the sight of unclothed women.

Its not every day that The Economist covers my little hometown which I haven't seen in 3 years :-(.

Which historical lunatic am I?

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Bliss goes wall climbing

Bliss tries her paws at climbing walls and catching prey midair. The "wall" is my roommate's bed standing vertically. The simulated prey is a puffy ball. She can actually catch the ball as it is falling down but it never happened while I was taking the video though it happened plenty of times otherwise.

The joys of cold weather

Much as I enjoy not being chilled to the bone, there is one thing I am thankful for while living in a cold place and that is the lack of dangerous fauna. Not dangerous as in lions, or tigers, but dangerous as in stuff that you cannot even see. While an encounter with a Bengal Tiger would leave you dead, there is a certain openness and honesty in the whole thing. You can see it coming, you can take evasive action, and whatever the ending, it comes quick enough.
Compare that to being bitten by a Black Widow. You hardly notice it until it happens, and then you are fucked. And a Black Widow is pretty harmless as far as these critters go. Last week, I could jumpinto my basement through the undergrowth without totally fearing for my life. If I was a 100 miles or so south I would be really scared doing the same. What if you disturb a Brown Recluse? That spider carries scary necrotoxins. You hardly feel anything when she bites, 4 days later there is a gaping 6 inch hole where she bit. And it doesn't heal for a couple of years or more. For all dieters, if you want to lose your appetite, google for Brown Recluse bites. And worse, where is the Black Widow among the most likely to bite? On the dick, when you sit to take a shit. she comes out from under the lip of the crapper. I don't know if there are any documented cases of a spider going inside a pussy but it doesn't seem farfetched.

And spiders are hardly the worst of it, look at this giant centipede eating a mouse. This guy picks and eats bats from air. And yes, it can kill you. I am glad I haven't encountered any in real life. Then there are all sorts of worms and stuff that like living inside you. Like the guineaworm, grows to several feet inside you and then comes out slowly, cms a day, from the leg. Very Painful. And if you try to pull it out and it breaks, you could die from septic shock due to the rest of the worm dying inside you.

There's things like filariasis, which cause some body parts to zoom to elephantine proportions. Yes, those things between their legs are their balls. No, they are not really virile.

There's fish like the Candiru that like to swim into the penis (more commonly vagina) and lodge themselves in there and suck on your blood. There is no way to remove it except through surgery.

And I've even looked into the warmer oceans which are full of beautiful deadly organisms that can take your life in an instant. So the next time I am trudging through a foot deep snow, I'll remind myself that at least I am not likely to be stepping on a bao constrictor or a giant centipede, or some scorpion, or getting various parasites into my skin or what not.

They call me Tripod

Bah. If they had bothered to interview me, I could have singleleggedly added at least a quarter of an inch to the average. Though someone should tell these guys about the perils of using self-selected groups to generalize to the general population.

A study of Indian stereotypes in the US

Hilariously funny.

We got the first proper snow for the season today. Proper as in there is a little accumulation. These pics were taken from inside as I was too lazy to wear something to go out.

My kitty was really begging to go out so I let her out. She didn't care for the cold so much. Usually she is like a bat out of hell as soon as the door is opened.

Organic tampons

Yesterday, while doing groceries at Trader Joes I noticed that right under dogfood they had a shelf full of organic tampons! I wonder if the idea is that once you are done with them you can feed them to your dog for a nutritious iron-rich meal. Or if they biodegrade while they are inside.

The Secret

Last night I saw The Secret, a documentary movie that claims to tell you about the secret to all success in your life and that how all the great thinkers in the world, from Einstein to Plato were in the know and for a low price of 10 bucks or so you could be too. I downloaded the movie off Bittorrent and fully encourage everybody to do as well. Not because the movie is a complete waste of money, many of its ideas are decent, but because it bastardizes science in an unacceptable way and I'd rather not see that supported.

The movie is in the same vein as What the Bleep Do We Know and I think its makers probably saw that one and it occurred to them that they could make a lot of money by combining some facts with a lot of hokey stuff and promising the world. The cinematography and CGI is similar and some of the people being interviewed are the same as well. It seems Quantum Physics is the snake oil of the 21st century, there were two quantum physicists there to reassure us that even if we did not understand anything, there was science backing all their assertions. There weren't any truly whacked out people like Ramtha in WTBDWK though. Both the physicists in this movie also appear in WTBDWK. They do interview people with titles like 'Visionary', and 'Metaphysician' which I didn't know existed in real life. I wonder if their main job in life is to appear in jokes like 'I never metaphysician who was academically rigorous'.

The 'secret' in movie, and I'll let it out since it isn't that much of a secret, is what they call the 'Law of Attraction' . That is, you attract what you imagine. Thus, if you think about, say, getting out of debt, then you actually attract more debt since the you are attracting that by imagining it. Some truth to it, but not as much as they would like to believe. It is true, and believable, that going after things you want is more effective than going away from things you don't want. Also, that your subconscious mind does not understand negatives so putting things in positive terms is a better way to create a reality in your mind. What I don't believe is that putting things in a positive way, somehow invokes quantum mechanics in such a way that the cosmos gets together and presents you with the Lear Jet that you were fantasizing about.

Bean put his arms around her. Not because he felt any personal need to do it, but because he knew she needed that gesture from him. Living with a family for a year had not given him the full complement of normal human emotional responses, but at least it had made him more aware of what they ought to be. And he did have one normal reaction -- he felt a little guilty that he could only fake what Mother needed, instead of having it come from the heart. But such gestures never came from the heart, for Bean. It was a language he had learned too late for it to come naturally to him. He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent. --Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon

Right now, I totally empathize with this passage and it fucking sucks. I don't know how long it will take for me to feel that I belong in this world, or if I ever will. In fact, I am reminded of another quote,

"... News had always suspected that people who regularly used the word 'community' were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew." --Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

This, I've suspected has been truer for longer than I've been cognizant. I dont ever recall being an accepted part of a 'community'. Now, I can function reasonably well as part of one. I can mix and chat and appear like I am having fun but I don't feel one with them. Not with nerd groups, not with religious groups, not with atheist organizations. Although, I don't do too badly in any of them. In fact, I remember being quite surprised at some point when I learned that not everybody feels this way. That there are people who seamlessly fit into communities. I thought this thing would get solved as I got older and well, it has significantly improved, but, for the moment, it seems I've hit a plateau and its depressing.

Gateway Arch

While puttering around on the google labs website, I discovered their Google Sketchup. A software for making realistic 3D models. While not intended to be a replacement for CAD I found it powerful and not so difficult to get the hang of. So as a start I decided to make a true model of the gateway arch, as detailed as could be without getting into things like windows and doors and stuff. After about a couple of hours, here it is. While I didn't bother getting the true catenary shape of the arch, it is pretty close as can be seen if you rotate the image in Google Earth you can get an exact overlap of my model on the real shadow. I made a better model. This took far less time and is more accurate and easier.