I listen to podcasts. This morning, as I was out taking care of a couple of things, I listened to Skepticality (Hi, Darek!). I'm a little behind, so I listened to the episode where Darek and Swoopy (and, as a digression, I am totally a Swoopy fanboy!) interviewed Brian Brushwood.
Who's Brian Brushwood, you ask? I'm so glad you inquired. Brian Brushwood is a prestidigitator. A damn good prestidigitator. However, it turns out that he's also the host of Scam School, a video podcast. If you like mythbusters, if you have any interest in prestidigitation, you'll enjoy this video podcast.
In high school, I kind of dabbled in prestidigitation. I was never very good. But watching a couple of episodes of Scam School have me thinking about those tricks again. Oh, and here's a gratuitous book reference... if you liked Carter Beats the Devil, you'll enjoy Scam School.
- Music:The Song Is Ended (But The Melody Lingers On) - Tony Bennett - Bennett/Berlin
So, I'm off to Highlands War. I'll be out of touch for several days.
I leave you with this: The Eden Project, a series of Fuller domes built as a greenhouse. Could it be scaled up? The program MegaEngineering on Discovery Channel seems to think so. I'm envisioning a Tucson dome....
- Music:Return of the Mars Hoax - Dr. Tony Phillips - Science @ NASA Feature Stories Podcast
I've been playing a fair amount of World of Warcraft lately. I'm unemployed, and it's cheap. ( cut for those who don't care. )
- Music:BloodlettingThe Vampire Song - Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting
I do think that MIT's Media Lab is on to something with SixthSense, but I'm not sure I like the projector idea. Having my email on a blank wall for anyone to see, for instance, is not necissarily a good idea, even if 3/4 of my email is from the various SCA lists I'm on, and publicly viewable by anyone who wants to, anyway.
On the other hand, having the information about a student displayed on the student doesn't seem a bad idea... at least that way, I could see what teachers are getting told about me. That reminds me, though, of an incident which occured when I was doing level two tech support for IBM... a customer called in, complaining about libelous things which someone else had written about him on the internet, and wanting us to remove them. Unfortunately, it wasn't a part of the internet that IBM owned.
Since I'm reasonably certain that there are people (not limited to teachers at the SoN) who would write very negative things about me, given the chance, getting to at least see what other people are seeing is probably a good idea. Boy, talk about first impressions being weighted against you!
Last summer, I read Hell's Gate and its sequel, Hell Hath No Fury by David Weber and Linda Evans. The MacGuffin in the novels is that there are infinite simultaneous realities, not so much parallel as perpendicular to each other. Where the worlds touch, inter-dimensional portals open spontaneously... ranging from one to thirty or forty kilometers in radius.
For some reason, tonight, I was thinking about the MacGuffin. If you know that you're emerging onto another Earth, shaped essentially the same way as this one, but you didn't know where you were emerging... how would you figure out where you were? You could figure out latitude pretty easily, but longitude becomes a real problem... the way we've done it for a couple of centuries is comparing the observed time of a celestial event with the reference time at which it occurred at Greenwich, England.
But if you don't know what time it is in Greenwich, the whole thing falls apart. There are more complicated ways of determining longitude, including observing the passage of the moons of Jupiter behind the planet. But how much equipment would you need to haul into a new world to see the moons of Jupiter, and make the required observations?
And then, once you knew where you were... where would you head, first? The beaches of South Africa, for the Diamonds? Sutter's Mill, for the gold? The Uranium fields of Kazakhstan? Probably not a good plan, that last one, unless you have the right equipment. But the first two... easy money.
Well, easy, except for the whole "treking across the whole world, doing the labor to recover the materials, and carting it home" part.
I rarely link YouTube video in my journal, but ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dorinda2212 brought this to my attention, and I think it's fabulous. ( Read more... )
For those who didn't choose to click under the lj-cut and view the film, it's about a woman from Australia who has spent most of her life as a double-leg amputee, and for whom Weta Workshop, the special effects house, built a functional prosthetic mermaid's tail to help her swim. As I watched the news video, I found myself thinking in a couple of interesting directions.
In the past, I've talked about John Varley's Steel Beach, in which he posits a society where it's easier to actually turn actors into centaurs for a season of a television drama than to repeatedly do special effects. I'm currently reading Cory Doctrow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom through Podiobooks1 , which talks about casual body modification... one in five teenagers having a particular, popularized, set of features, people making changes to their height, et cetera... and I recently read a book entitled The Scientific Conquest of Death which leads me to believe that the ideas in those SciFi novels weren't necissarily as wild as all that.
So... if people are feeling crowded on land... why not get a body modification or several, and take to the seas? Whales and sharks are having their larks, why shouldn't we? Admittedly, it's a bit hard to cook a hamburger in the middle of the South Pacific, but I can imagine island resorts having aquatic tables....
[1] And may I also suggest the "A different point of view" series? That's some funny stuff, and very thought-provoking for fans of Star Wars
- Music:Strange Meadow Lark-Time Out-The Dave Brubeck Quartet
I woke up about an hour ago, probably because my knees hurt. I turned on Discovery Channel, in the hope it would lull me back to sleep. There's a show for kids on, and they're talking about the Chinese Emperors who ruled from the Forbidden City. One of the things they said was that the Emperor had chroniclers who recorded "every aspect of the Emperor's life" for future generations.
Which has me wondering just how thorough those chroniclers were. "10:18 -- The Son of Heaven, having dined on eel, was much given to flatulence, giving voice to three rather loud bursts of divine wind."
I knew there had to be a modern treadle-powered sewing machine out there, somewhere... and using my google-fu, I have discovered it! Tremble in fear of my mighty searchieness!
- Music:It Doesn't Matter Anymore-Linda Ronstadt - Greatest Hits-Linda Ronstadt
As if we haven't had enough bad economic news, the head of the International Monetary Fund has warned that the world's financial system is on the brink of systemic meltdown. The paranoid part of me is suggesting that now might be a good time to stock up on pasta, rice, and ammunition.
Oh, and I discovered why (until the recent Peter Jackson movies) Orcs were commonly depicted as pig-snouted, stout humanoids. The word comes from the Gaelic for "Pig." The Orkney islands were known to the early inhabitants of Scotland as the home of swine, you see. Why Professor Tolkein chose the word for his baddies is anyone's guess.
Anyway... going off to transfer patterns to tissue, and at least do the major cutting of my fabric doublet. I keep saying I'm going to get this done, and then something comes up, and I don't. I think that's called "procrastination."
- Music:Episode 1: The Okie Dokie Swamp Thingie.-90 Second Cellphone Chillin' Theatre-ZBS Foundation
I went to sleep around eight-thirty last night, but I was up again by midnight... and have been up since. Being awake in the early morning hours is not good for me; I almost invariably end up thinking too much about things I can't do anything about. It's different if I'm working, but if I'm at loose ends....
Anyway. I read an article on the BBC News website, about a South Pacific country that has provided all of its school children with XO laptops, the laptops developed by the One Laptop Per Child program. Frankly this is fantastic; it will serve as a real testing ground for the laptops. But the thing I found fascinating was that this laptop was developed at MIT's Media Lab... the group founded by the guy who wrote When Things Start to Think, which was a fascinating read this past summer, for me.
And that's about all I have to say about that.
As promissed in the URL, this is damn interesting. And work safe. Make sure you read the comments. One of the things I find interesting is the way they talk about using superconductors in the magnetic bearings... of course, if we had room-temperature superconductors, we wouldn't need to use flywheels to store energy, 'cause we'd have superconductive loops to do that....
I met someone the other day named Goatse. It was all I could do to keep a straight face. (My mother and other people who don't understand the reference should not look it up -- you don't want to know).
Had an incident at work yesterday that made me kind of uncomfortable. I walked into the office manager's office to talk to her, and saw one of the care providers standing outside her office. So I said, "Hey, Mrs. Que called, would like you to call her back when you have a chance." The provider snapped, "Don't nag!" and stalked off.
Worked in the ER on Tuesday, for my clinical rotation. I like the ER, I like feeling like the things I'm doing make an immediate difference in the quality of people's lives. But the nurse I was assigned to really didn't want a student, and was gruff and abrasive to me all day.
I feel discouraged.
I've been busy like no one's business, working 20 hours each week, plus going to school. But, in the cracks, I've been thinking. In Japan, there are three styles of writing -- katakana, hiragana, and kanji. Katakana and Hiragana are syllabries... each character represents a complete syllable. But since the Japanese language is built on that idea, it works. Kanji, on the other hand, are more complicated -- each one expresses a complete idea, though they can also represent sounds.
In the western world, largely as a result of Christianity gaining preeminence, we use the character set which was used to write Latin, rather than cyrillic or runic alphabets. In this, we're using a similar concept to the kana -- distinct building blocks which are used to build more complicated words. But I've come to realize we have our own version of kanji, as well.
Don't believe me? Quick, what does this symbol mean? ª? Why is it that even when wearing a kilt, I walk into the door marked with the symbol on the right, instead of the one on the left:
ralenth, even when wearing jeans, walk through the door marked with the symbol on the left? Because we're aware of what they mean, in a larger, cultural sense, despite how we may be dressed in that moment.
More examples? How do you know what button to push to get your CD / DVD / Video tape to play? To go forwards or backwards quickly? Iconography. I'm curious what examples you can think of.
So, let me start by saying that I've spent most of my time over the last three days with nausweetheart. Carrying things for her. Large, heavy things. Up three flights of stairs. Why, you ask? Well... um... because I'm not smart, but I can lift heavy things.
More seriously, because nausweetheart is one of the Girls Who Dine, the which I referred to occasionally in the spring semester. And, um, she asked. And, you know... it's hard for me to refuse a request as simple as, "Hey, if you're not doing anything all that exciting, would you come lift heavy things for me?"
I'll leave it to her to explain the drama involved; I'll just say that she abruptly needed to move out of the apartment she'd been living in, and into the dorm.
In the middle of this, I also had drama with my beloved eMac. The short version is that the most recent security update, 2005-007 for OS X.3.9, fraked my OS. Joy.
I'm recovered, now. Mostly.
But that's why I haven't posted anything the last few days. Items of interest:
- Japanese scientists have come up with a thin "skin" which will let robots have a sense of touch, and the ability to feel temperature. I want my cool robot slave now, please.
- British scientists have designed a silent airplane. I can't think of anything clever to say about that, but it's cool.
- Hey, lysander_cat, check this out: It reminds me of the stuff BC does, only bigger. And more expensive. If that technical theater thing doesn't work out for him... look at the prices this guy charges.
And now... to bed. Day after tomorrow, I'm meeting with the lovely
lapis_lazuli in Phoenix.Some people like to dress their facts up with fancy figures or evasive rhetoric. Here at
cowboy_r central, we're what you might call a sort of fact nudist camp... we like our facts in the raw.One of these raw facts occured... or rather, reoccured... to me last night.
cowboy_r is a geek. He's dry, dull, and pedantic. Oh, and he thinks about Star Trek way too much.Last night, on the phone,
lapis_lazuli asked me if the turbolifts on starships were just elevators, or if they could move from side to side as well.She got a twenty-minute lecture on turbolifts (they move side to side, as well) which branched off into life pods, air-tight integrety, the need for starship systems to fail into a safe condition, why starship design engineers might not put seatbelts on a starship, and I don't remember what-all else.
Tuesday night, Tom took a deep breath, about to launch into a complicated explanation about something, then let it out, grinned, and said, "Well, I won't go into that, or I'll sound like R."
I also have to admit that I'm something of a curmudgeon, and am occasionally difficult to get along with. In the last month, I've managed to alienate two people who used to be friends. This isn't a happy thing.
Once upon a time, Cowboy R didn't date a woman who was an editor for a couple of major Science Fiction publishers over the years. She maintained that serious science fiction enthusiasts didn't say (or write, I suppose) SciFi, but rather, SF.
I think she was full of hot air on that one, but be that as it may, last night I went over to T&T's house and watched the season premere of Stargate SG-1.
I rather like the SciFi channel, but at least around here, they're only on digital cable, and that's pretty well expensive. Given that I currently don't even have an income....
Anyway, while I was watching the SG-1 season premere, I noticed that two things were getting pushed mighty hard... Hulk and Battlestar Galactica.
The problem is that BSG isn't on 'til December, and I probably still won't have the SciFi channel.
Oh, well. At least I've had a couple of people volunteer to tape it for me.
This morning, exchanging cell-phone text messages with
hamner, I thought about Dick Tracey's watch-phone. So I went surfing a little bit, and found that a couple of companies... NTT of Japan, and Samsung of Korea... had produced things that were sort of like that, but that neither was offered in the US.
Which is kind of disapointing.
One thing I found was a watch which vibrates when your cell phone rings. I imagine it's tuned to the frequency of your phone, and receives the same signal, but it still seems kind of silly.
One thing that speaks against a cell phone watch, though, is that it's likely to be a digital watch. And, Douglas Adams notwithstanding, digital watches are so 20th century!
I rather liked the gadgetry in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age, but it'll probably take twenty-five to fifty years to reach that level of computational savvy.
Still... a geek can dream....
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to dry rose petals?
I had a conversation with someone this morning, about being a geek. (Starts with G, ends with "EEEEEEEEEEK!")
After a little bit of discussion, it turns out that this person doesn't actually want to be a geek, just to look like one. She doesn't seem to want to actually understand how stuff works; she just wants to make it work.
To me, this violates the Geek prime directive.
There are many kinds of geeks. There are, of course, Circus Geeks, who bite the heads off of chickens, or perform similarly disguisting and antisocial acts.
There are computer geeks, who will sit in a theater before the movie, and proclaim loudly that Mac OS is not dead, damn it!... and similar disguisting and antisocial acts.
There are physics geeks, who will explain to you all about how photon-electron interaction is mirrored front-to-back, and it's possible that it's a pointer to the bidirectionality of time.
But the thing that all geeks have in common, I think (with the possible exception of the Circus Geek), is what Feynman called "the kick in the discovery," what Kippling called 'satiable curiosities.
In short, Geeks ask, "Why?" and "How does that work?"
Isaac Asimov once wrote that the sound of science happening isn't "Eureeka!" but "Huh. That's kind of strange...."
I'm a geek. I've been a geek since I was a little child.
dezertsky (AKA my momster) tells the story of how, as a pre-verbal toddler, I knocked over a rocking chair to figure out how the music box attatched to its rocker worked.So... say it loud, and say it proud, I'm Geek and I'm... er... unable to think of anything appropriate to rhyme with that.
