Slimy Things With Legs

We want... information.

2008-10-24T13:59:27Z

All the contact information in my address book is completely outdated. Really, really outdated. Some of it seems to date back to maybe 2003.

Would anybody like to help me remedy this situation?

You certainly don't have to post things here; you can get information to me through the usual channels.

pristis @ 2008-09-10T20:59:00

2008-09-10T19:59:59Z

Here's a note to myself that I found a minute ago:

"The dead have come back to life, but they mostly want shoes."

UPDATE:

I have also found "selling counterfeit bees".

The earth died, and it was was about to enter upon silence times...

2008-05-22T12:37:24Z

(The subject line is hyperbolic, but I can never resist the opportunity to quote Taito video games. This line is from the game Metal Black. And yes, the final boss in the video is the Cambrian organism Opabinia regalis.)

(This post is kind of incoherent; perhaps I'll post a revised version later.)

Some time ago, I ran into this, by James Hansen.

Our conclusion is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350 ppm. We find that peak CO2 can be kept to about 425 ppm, with large estimates for oil and gas reserves, if coal use is phased out by 2030 (except where CO2 is captured and sequestered) and unconventional fossil fuels are not tapped substantially. Peak CO2 can be kept close to 400 ppm, if actual reserves are closer to those estimated by “peakists,” who believe that the globe is already at peak global oil production, having extracted about half of readily extractable oil resources.

This lower 400 ppm peak can be ensured, assuming phase-out of coal emissions by 2030, if a practical limit on reserves is achieved by means of actions that prevent fossil-fuel extraction from public lands, off-shore regions under government control, environmentally pristine regions and extreme environments. The concerned public can influence this matter, but time is short, the industry voice is strong and climate effects have not yet become so obvious to the public as to overwhelm the disinformation from industry moguls.

These conclusions are drawn from a recent paper by Hansen, which can be found here. (I have not read it yet.) These sorts of things seem to be popping up all over now, partly because I have partially restarted my earlier news-collecting strategies.

In this context, I think it is worthwhile to mention that wild populations appear to be declining rapidly. This (rather obviously) cannot be ascribed to global warming alone. Halting the general ongoing decline in biodiversity will require much more far-reaching changes, particularly with regard to human patterns of land use.

I think it is clear that we are not doing enough. This is not a new trend:

North Atlantic fish stocks have been in decline for well over a century. Callum Roberts points out in his recent book The Unnatural History of the Sea that it was obvious from the 1880s that fish stocks were in decline. Fish catch records from the 1920s onwards show that, despite the enormous improvements in boat design and trawling technology and better refrigeration, catches of the great Atlantic species, such as haddock, cod, hake and turbot, remained constant or slowly declined. As they have ever since.

Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal - a deal in the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-heralded disaster with our fish?

'Quite simply,' Roberts says, 'agreements and deals brokered by politicians will never be satisfactory. They always look for the short-term fix.' He and his team at York University did a survey of the last 20 years of EU ministerial decisions on fish catches and found that, on average, they set quotas for fishing fleets 15 to 30 per cent higher than those recommended as safe by scientists.

'What that figure doesn't tell you is that often, for less threatened species like mackerel or whiting, they have set quotas 100 per cent higher than the science recommended. So, in their efforts to pacify the industry, they are bringing populations that could be sustainably fished into the risk zone,' he said.

The fishing industry, Roberts feels, has exerted excessive influence on politicians in Europe's Atlantic nations since the 18th century - when it was necessary to keep the fleets well manned, as a source of seamen for their navies when war broke out.

Admittedly, existing issues with fisheries represent one of the most dire environmental problems in the world today. Citing the above article may not represent any accurate picture of our present efforts to stem the destruction of the world's biodiversity.

But I am not very optimistic. My suspicion is that this sort of thing, as excerpted from the Center for Biological Diversity newsletter that I subscribe to, seems to be more indicative of our present actions:

As I wrote you last week, Bush's May 14th decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species contained a cynical "special rule" designed to prevent the listing from having any impact on global warming.

The administration admitted that the polar bear is spiraling toward extinction due to global warming, but brazenly refused to do anything about it. It even admitted that its goal was to keep the oil wells flowing and the power plants polluting.

Simple things will not save the Earth. Institutional efforts are needed to tackle these problems. The power of personal efforts does not appear to be very great:

While Gates's [the article is referring to Bill Gates] consumption was estimated from published reports, the students interviewed a local Buddhist monk. He lived off savings earned in the tech industry, and spent half the year sharing a friend's apartment and the other half, he claimed, living in a forest. His footprint: about 10.5 tonnes.

The homeless person, who used soup kitchens and slept in a city shelter, used about 8.5 tonnes, the "floor" for energy consumption in the U.S. In working out a formula to measure carbon footprint, Gutowski and his students took into account the services available to all Americans, including use of roads, police services, banks, schools, libraries and the judicial system.

"Goods and services are provided to all citizens, and certain amounts of energy are required and carbon is emitted for those services. At what point do you say you've got to fix the system?"

Again, I am not so sure about the study&mdash the press often mangles scientific results quite thoroughly. But the primary literature related to these questions is far too vast, and too specialized, for me to tackle. I am forced to rely on other sources.

Bizarrely enough, something completely different summarized my feelings about this. In considering the nature of environmental news, I was struck by this passage from Amusing Ourselves to Death:

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: in a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighbourhood", but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.

Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: by generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action ratio".

In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But the situation created by telegraphy, and hen exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rate of inflation, crime, and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: you plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and will then submerge it in a Niagra of similar opinions, and convert them into&mdash what else?&mdash another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinion about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

It's hard to escape the feeling that something's got to give.

(I suppose I should note that I have a lot of criticisms to make regarding Amusing Ourselves to Death. I will post them later.)

In the event that you're interested

2008-04-30T19:58:40Z

I would just like to note that one of my favorite films, La Planète sauvage (known in English as Fantastic Planet), has been put up on YouTube in its entirety. I saw this movie when I was quite young, and it had a very powerful effect on me.

It's all very weird, though. If you're the kind of person who'd enjoy the Codex Seraphinianus, then you'd probably like it; otherwise, you might find it too odd to be worthwhile.

Thought of the Day

2008-04-29T00:16:23Z

"In fact, it may be more adequate to view the life cycle itself as the unit of selection rather than the parasite." (From Evolutionary Ecology of Parasites: From Individuals to Communities, by Robert Poulin.)

Bonus thought: I have no friggin' clue how endospores evolved.

Never the LEFT kidney...

2008-04-10T19:26:25Z

From my parasitology textbook (Parasitism, by Bush et al.):

"Dictophyme renale normally infect the right kidney (the reason for the predilection for the right kidney is unknown) of mink (Mustela vison) and effectively turns the kidney into an empty capsule."

Right.

At times like this, I think of the Pkunk: "Ah, the mysteries of the Universe. Try to understand 'em, but can you? Nope, they're mysteries!"

Pigeons

2008-03-30T18:51:47Z

You know how pigeons will walk awkwardly away from you if you get too close, and then fly a little ways away if you chase them? My favorite thing to do with pigeons is to walk behind them slowly, just fast enough for them to try to walk away, in their sort of pigeon-speedwalk, but not fast enough for them to bother flying. If you keep it up for thirty seconds or so, you get one seriously freaked out pigeon. Eventually they decide that it's worth their while to fly away from you after all, and when they do, they want to be way the hell away from the crazy pigeon-stalker that's following them.

I've gone into biology because I love animals. You can tell, can't you?

Alchemy is confusing

2008-02-05T20:51:41Z

Stephanos of Alexandria:

"For when it shall spurn the blackness of the wrinkled crust, it is transformed to whiteness; then the moon of shining light shall send forth the rays; then to the later whitening, when you shall see the white compound. For when the full of the moon appears, then the full moon discloses its light. Then solid is the yellowing. What is this? Say. The whiteness perceived. And how do you render the white yellow? Ye wisest of men, over-pass the reasoning, this answer is a secret, a mystic speech and consideration. I will tell you the hidden mystery, whence it is proclaimed above you. 'After the cleaning of the copper and its later attenuation and the blackening for the later whitening, then it is the solid yellowing.' When you see the whitening taking place within it, recognize the concealed yellowing, then know the whitening as being yellow, then also being white, it becomes yellow by its hidden yellowness, by possessing the depths of its heart, by having the corporeal possession of the whiteness of the silver and, unutterably, the pervading whiteness in it. 'This is the solid yellowing.' What is this? That which has become white, it is the yellow. For the same white appears in the colour, but the yellow nature overrules it."

I am very grateful that my organic chemistry textbook was not written in this fashion.

Early Adopter?

2008-01-27T01:06:39Z

"I used to dream of the day when my computer would be as easy to use as my phone. It has happened. I no longer know how to use my phone." &mdash Bjorn Stroustrup

I seem to own a ton of consumer electronics now. I didn't really ask for them; I've acquired everything as a series of gifts. I feel guilty of excessive consumerism, and thinking about the amount of nitric acid that must have been needed to produce these items makes me cry. I have to admit that they are nice toys, though, and they're expensive enough to make me quite reluctant to return them, on account of the feelings of the gift-givers. Anyway, I thought I'd write a little bit about the most recent items I've acquired:

Pandigital 11" Digital Picture Frame

I confess that I've wanted a digital picture frame for a long time now, because I have a strange habit of collecting images off the internet, but haven't had any way to display them. I fantasized about putting a frame in the window of my office, if I ever had an office, and displaying hundreds of different comics&mdash like the usual strip tacked up the to door, except a lot better.

The Pandigital frame hasn't really lived up to my hopes. The first warning sign came when I plugged it into my computer through the USB port: the name came up as all-caps and eight characters long. It didn't seem like a device that would be Macintosh-friendly, and, sure enough, it registered every file I put on it as several files, treating the resource forks as individual entities. It's formatted as MS-DOS File System (FAT32), according to Disk Utility, and while I suppose this makes sense, it's pretty inconvenient. I've thought about formatting it as HFS+, but I'm not sure whether this would do anything unfortunate to the frame. I'll probably try it later.

I duplicated the images I was planning to upload and used FinderCleaner to strip their resource forks and associated hidden files. (Yeah, I could have just used the command line, but I didn't feel like it.) Uploading pictures to the internal memory is quite slow. I'm still not sure why this is the case.

The frame has a stand which rotates to allow it to stand in a portrait orientation, and I thought this was a better use of the rectangular display. Unfortunately, the stand is the only concession to a portrait mode that the Pandigital 11" possesses. It doesn't detect its own orientation, like at least one other frame I've heard of does, so every picture I put on it must be rotated before it's uploaded. While the remote that comes bundled with frame possesses a "rotate" button, there's no way to rotate a group of files, and the rotate function rotates the displayed picture the wrong way. Worse, files rotated by the frame itself don't look very good, and every rotation creates its own text file on the drive, and the picture frame occasionally forgets that a picture has been rotated, usually at the start of a slideshow. I solved this problem by creating an Automator script (which had all of two steps) to rotate all the pictures I planned on putting on the frame. Alas, Automator choked when I asked it to handle 150-odd fairly-high-resolution images lacking resource forks, and would frequently quit in the middle of the process. Finally, in accordance with Murphy's Law, I initially rotated all the images in the wrong direction. It was at about this point that I scrapped everything and started over.

I quickly discovered that the picture frame can only display JPEG files. No GIF, no TIFF, no PNG. And from there I learned that only some JPEGs work: the frame does not support "progressive" JPEGs. I don't know what that means, and I see no reason why I should have to. It took a while to work this out, because the frame displayed only a helpful "Format Not Supported!!" message.

There are other miscellaneous problems. Should some poor fool dare use the rotating stand, the frame is designed so that the power switch winds up on the bottom of the frame, the least accessible position. The remote uses cheap bubble-y switches, and possesses no power button; while the frame can play music (for the love of Bob, WHY?), the remote also lacks any way to turn the music off its endless loop, although it can control the music's volume. The mini USB jack juts directly out of the back of the frame, meaning that it is impossible to lay the frame flat while transferring files without risking damage to the connector. The frame has only 256 MB of internal memory, which seems odd, given the price of USB drives. The power cord is oddly short. There's no way to create playlists of either pictures or music; should you desire such an odd feature, the best way to achieve it seems to be to use a different SD card for each slide show. While navigating menus, the frame occasionally exhibits an odd bug in which part of the screen moves off-center and wraps around to its other side.

All in all, a stellar example of industrial design. It has funny transitions between pictures (which I can turn off, thank god) and can play MP3s, badly.

I think someone failed to put much thought into this product's core function&mdash displaying pictures.

...sadly, this is pretty much par for the course for consumer electronics products I've used. Apple's products are pretty good, and I have an unhealthy love for my HP laser printer, but everything else seems hastily thrown together to satisfy a list of bullet points. I'm probably going to stick with this model, because digital picture frames in general seem terribly poorly designed, and I doubt that I can find a better one.

Tom-Tom One XL GPS Unit

This was described as a "mercy gift". Most of you are aware of my uncanny talent for getting lost&mdash paraleipsis particularly, perhaps. I was given a GPS to attempt to remedy this situation, and, to my great surprise, it mostly works. In fact, it works so well that I am now convinced it is a thing of witchcraft and devilry which must be burned. I am wary of associating with Global Positioning Sorcery.

In one of my early tests of the device, I was able to navigate to a distant location without ever having the faintest idea where I was or where I was going. Worse, it got me there on time. This was a rather creepy feeling, and blindly following the instructions of the GPS reminded me eerily of Marshall Brain's hypothetical program Manna. (Disclaimer: I have a deeply-felt animosity towards Marshall Brain's writing, and towards a lot of his thinking as well.) It was suddenly very clear to me how people could drive off cliffs while listening to a GPS unit&mdash mine could have easily directed me to Idaho, or into a wall, without my realizing it.

I'd owned a GPS unit before, but it wasn't nearly as threatening. It was a Magellan model with a tiny LCD screen, and most of the amusement one could derive from it stemmed from turning on and leaving outside for fifteen minutes while it vainly attempted to find a satellite. Sometimes it would get lucky and manage to figure out the latitude and longitude of where it was, which I imagine gave it a great sense of personal satisfaction.

I was encouraged to name my new GPS, and so I named it Julie, because I've always wanted to name an inanimate object Julie. I set Julie's voice to be British and told her to display distance in metric units, because I wanted to gain an intuitive understanding of metric units. This also has the advantage of confusing anybody riding in the car with me.

I don't know about 99% of the Tom-Tom One XL's features, and I don't care about them. Even though it's probably one of the most useful things I own, I never actually wanted a GPS, and the entire utility of it lies in its ability to flawlessly direct me to places I've never been to, or places I've been to lots of times and can't remember how to get to. There's some software included with it on a CD-ROM, and it can connect to my computer, but both these features are quite useless to a person equipped with a Macintosh. This is kind of a shame, because I could theoretically give Julie a New Zealand accent. The Tom-Tom One XL also comes with a set of international plug adaptors&mdash which is interesting, given that I can't find any clear information suggesting that it can load a map of anywhere but the United States&mdash and a suction cup which is meant to be used to affix the GPS to the car windshield. The suction cup is about as useless as any other suction cup I have ever used. I think I'm going to have to superglue the GPS-holder in place, or something.

Of course, that might be a bad idea, because someone might decide to break into my car(*). The Quick Start guide to the Tom-Tom One XL begins by noting that GPS units are popular targets for theft, and suggests taking the GPS with you whenever you leave the car; similarly, the shutdown screen displays an image of a person putting the GPS into some sort of briefcase. I've been informed that merely having a suction cup on the inside of one's windshield significantly increases the risk of having one's car broken into, as thieves will operate on the assumption that there's a GPS somewhere in the car.

(*)It's not actually my car, I just use it.

Altogether, this is probably the most futuristic thing I own.

Olympus Stylus 770SW Digital Camera

This is more of a note than a review, because there's a scarily comprehensive review here. The important part, however, is that the Olympus Stylus 770SW is crushproof (up to 220 lbs), freezeproof (down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit), waterproof (to 33 feet), and shockproof (it can survive a drop of up to 5 feet). My last camera had a resolution which is now regularly surpassed by the cameras on cellphones, so I'm quite happy to have a new one. The 770SW has a ton of features that I don't understand, and they're all buried under menus accessed via several very overloaded buttons, but I'm actually interested in trying out all the options, so I'll learn them eventually. With the aid of the National Geographic Guide to Digital Photography, most likely. So far, I've only had two major disappointments: 1) the camera's night mode is hard to use without generating very blurry pictures, and 2) it takes xD cards, so I can't use an awesome wireless SD card.

This is a camera that whispers to me in quiet moments. "Go outside," it breathes seductively. "I am waterproof. Take pictures with me. Stop sitting at the goddamn computer."

Interests Collage

2008-01-25T19:59:01Z

Create your own! By ga_woo using Web Services by Yahoo!

Meme introduced to me by ariiadne

The collage of what I've been blogging about is much weirder. I feel reasonably certain that I haven't mentioned corsets. Or absinthe.

I don't understand software pricing

2008-01-22T22:19:09Z

(This post has been sitting around in my Future Blog Posts folder for a long time, so I thought I'd finally post it.)

Okay, so, in economic terms, firms price goods so as to maximize profit, with total profit being determined by marginal profit multiplied by the number of items sold at a given price (the latter being determined by the demand curve). Right?

Now, we know that lots of people pirate programs like Photoshop. Lest we make the classic error of the RIAA, we must note that many of these pirates have a willingness-to-pay for Photoshop that is less than its $300-odd price tag. Some pirates have a willingness-to-pay that's close to $0, in fact, but given that going through the hassle of pirating Photoshop incurs a significant opportunity cost of some kind, it seems reasonable to assume that these people are in the minority. Without getting into the whole "information on the internet is a congestible public good and therefore has a natural market price of zero" argument, it seems as if plenty of people who might otherwise pirate Photoshop would probably buy it if it were available at a lower price. We also know that the marginal cost of production for software is very low, so there's no reason that Adobe couldn't lower the price. At $300, lots of people are pirates; at $30, even people who didn't much like manipulating images would probably own a legitimate copy.

In other words, it intuitively seems like a lot of software is rather expensive for no damn good reason, as the people that write it could probably make oodles of cash by lowering their prices. It's my personal suspicion that this phenomenon extends to many cases where it is assumed that a piece of software has a very limited market&mdash it seems to me that the market for software like MATLAB is artificially restricted by its insane price.

froborr suggests that Adobe prices its software so as to get maximum profit from businesses, and turns a blind eye to piracy for home use, as the latter merely enhances the popularity of its software. This is a plausible explanation, but Adobe really doesn't seem to turn a blind eye to piracy at all&mdash last I heard, they were pretty aggressive about it.

I get rather frustrated about this sort of thing. I've always subscribed to the "bicycle for the mind" view of computers, regarding them as creative tools rather than passive conduits of information. If computers are to be this way, though, then the neat programs can't stay locked behind multiple-hundred-dollar price tags! What I wouldn't do with a cheap molecular modeling program...! The open source movement seems to offer some kind of answer, but so far I have to admit that I've been disappointed with it.

Anyway, does anybody care to do an actual economic assessment of the situation, as opposed to making a half-assed post on LiveJournal?

Ten to one such an assessment already exists; I just don't know where it is. Quick and precise research seems to be invaluable to me. I should study the methodology of it.

This sort of thing also works with giant octopi

2008-01-19T09:17:11Z

So we're working on characters for the Tombs of Horrors pre-made setting, which cnogard is running this weekend. These characters are likely to die horrible, messy deaths. Mine has embraced this idea; he is a Trap Enthusiast, a connoisseur of hideous lethal devices. froborr is playing a Paladin/Lasher named Cordelia Belmont, who rides a lion named Gracie. dejapes's character is a cleric of strength and healing, which are both things that we are likely to need. The conversation has raised the following topic:

froborr, paraphrased: "If you construct a druid/sorcerer right, you can have a bear riding into combat on an elephant while throwing fireballs. As a standard combat tactic." This requires the feat that allows you to cast spells as a bear or other wild shape (Natural Spell), the ability to summon elephants (Summon Nature's Ally VI), and the capacity to throw fireballs (Fireball, which is pretty self-explanatory).

This works much better if you know what a polar bear is, because polar bears have much better stats. So make sure your character is either from the savannah and has visited the frozen northlands, or vice versa.

This tactic has one obvious flaw, as dejapes pointed out. An elephant has no character levels, and is thus probably vulnerable to level-draining attacks. Should our elephant-riding sorcerous polar bear druid encounter a wight, it is likely that it will become a sorcerous polar bear druid riding an undead elephant, and shortly thereafter a sorcerous polar bear druid in a rather untenable position about fifteen feet in the air. This raises the interesting question of what, exactly, happens to a summoned creature which becomes an undead abomination in the course of its servitude. We hypothesize that summoned elephants are in fact removed from a natural elephant habitat of some type, and that the situation described above would result in an irate undead elephant taking up residence in a savannah somewhere, much to the detriment of the local wildlife.

It reminds me of the time froborr destroyed a powerful undead monster by temporarily becoming a giant squid...

I Live After All

2008-01-08T09:16:30Z

I was planning on making a post for New Years', and then I didn't. This post is essentially pointless, but I feel like posting it anyway.

1) There is no alchemical symbol for carbon. This must be rectified. Any suggestions?

2) It is possible to buy hagfish over the internet&mdash but I want live hagfish, darn it! Or possibly a hagfish stuffed animal. Maybe a little plastic hagfish?

3) I got an 11-inch digital picture frame for Christmas (which is a very impractical gift that I have nowhere to put, but it's still awesome), and I want to make it all steampunk-y, kind of like the stuff Datamancer does, but I'm not at all sure what that would look like. And my machining skills are... well, if you handed me a Dremel I'm sure I'd manage to ruin one of my appendages using it. I'm not sure what to do.

4) You know how it's possible to append the phrase "in bed" to nearly any fortune commonly provided via cookie? I've found another phrase like that: "under standard temperature and pressure." (273K and 1 atm, for those of you who may have forgotten.) It makes slightly less sense, but it's just as fun.
"You have the ability to analyze and solve any problem, under standard temperature and pressure." (I received this fortune a while ago, and found its cheerful hyperbole so amusing that I taped it to my computer monitor.)

"You will step on the soil of many countries, under standard temperature and pressure."

And it works for other things, as well:

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, under standard temperature and pressure."

It turns out that cnorgard beat me to posting this.

5) Apparently people wanted computers more than world peace this past Christmas. Of course, the source is rather suspect, seeing as the survey was done by the Consumer Electronics Association. I keep trying to come up with some charitable interpretation of this result, but it's very tough. (I know it's way too late for this to be interesting, but since when have I ever been on time?)

6) BoingBoing&mdash I think it was BoingBoing&mdash introduced me to a really neat short film that I can't resist posting about: Terminus. I don't completely understand what the protagonist is so worried about, though; I think it'd be kind of interesting to be perpetually followed by a sort of concrete eidolon.

Oh Wow, Trout is Back!

2007-11-09T12:06:29Z

I thought it was completely dead! It hadn't updated since about 2002!

Trout is one of those websites that has exercised a truly disturbing degree of influence on my life. It is easily the most obscure of those websites (yes, even more obscure than Toastyfrog), and I don't believe I've ever met anyone else who reads it.

It's difficult to describe Trout; it has, um, a column written by a plant, and another written by Henry the Virtual Cat, and there's a series about an adventurer who seeks to collect rare autographs, and... well, here's an example of what I like about it.

Look, just go read Templar's Bar. Only the first episode is presently online, but there once was a lot more, and they got really good, believe me.

This incoherent blog posting has been brought to you by Gleeful Surprise.

It's Just A Question

2007-11-08T20:37:19Z

Do you ever think to yourself— while you are running an errand, say— something like the following: "Why am I here? Why am I holding this slip of paper in my hand? Why are the lights so harsh? Why is everything done in primary colors? Who are all these people? Who designed this thing, anyhow? I don't know. I don't like it here, very much. I wish I were somewhere else."

I suspect that these moments of lucidity are all that prevents me from going spectacularly and irretrievably insane. Well, the medication helps too.

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in Light of...

2007-11-02T17:50:38Z

This is startlingly beautiful.

Incidentally, I believe it is possible to create a useful theory of intelligent design; however, it would attempt to formally elucidate the processes by which human beings engineer things, rather than spew nonsense about the biological world. Thoughts in this direction make me want to read the works of Henry Petroski.

Of course devotees of memetics would argue that human engineering-- and indeed human behavior in general-- proceeds by a selection process anyway, so there'd ultimately be few differences between between the process of biological evolution and the process of human engineering. But I really don't put much stock in memetics.

(I saw this on Pharyngula, of course. Originally seen at No More Mister Nice Guy!)

Posted Before It Gets Any Longer

2007-10-24T21:34:02Z

1) Although I have done no formal study-- I am not quite that bored-- yet-- I have noted that car commercials seem to be a frequent occurrence on television. Many of these commercials rely on emotional appeals regarding the apparent fun-ness of driving the car in question. This state of affairs perplexes me. People do not buy cars very often, and the relatively expensive nature of car purchases would seem to discourage potential car-buyers from being influenced by emotional appeals. How can such a profusion of car commercials possibly be cost-effective?

Several people have suggested possible answers to me: 1) people are more easily influenced by emotional appeals than I think, even on major purchases; 2) people buy cars more often that I think they do; 3) car companies are really stupid; 4) there is a very high profit on any single car sold, so that an ad which causes even one extra car sale pays for itself handsomely; and 5) frequent car commercials are essential for the maintenance of brand recognition. None of these feels like a true answer. I intend to contact some car companies.

I should note that I feel the same way about prescription drug commercials ("Do your bones forcibly eject themselves from your body at inconvenient moments? Try Golgaphrenicol! Side effects may include 360° head rotation, projectile vomiting...").

2) Would anyone like to join me for a game of 1,000 Blank White Cards, Nomic, Lexicon, or Mornington Crescent? Or maybe the Wuthering Heights roleplaying game?

3) I have a program, Ocean Waves, which is devoted entirely to simulating the sound of, well, ocean waves. It is shareware, and the author wants $10, which seems rather high to me, especially when I consider that I can get more impressive programs like GraphClick for less than that. And yet I'm weirdly addicted.... it's sad..... It makes me wonder how hard it would be to simulate other types of ambient noise, particularly rain drumming on a thinnish roof. A program that could do many other types of ambient sound would be much more useful than Ocean Waves.

4) One of my great (or possibly very stupid, depending on how you look at it) ambitions is get on FidoNet. If you guessed that I have no idea how to do this using programs that will run on Mac OS X, then you are correct. I'm actually less sure why I want to do this, because it wouldn't connect me to much of anybody.

5) What's a good look for steampunk fairies?

6) I think I'd really like a telescoping table lamp that I could collapse into a smallish size to take with me when I go somewhere. Alternatively, it'd be nice to have a telescoping table lamp that could extend into being a floor lamp. Both ideas would work better if I could come up with a collapsible lampshade, but I don't have any really good notions on that front. Of course, neither idea is all that practical.

There is this little thing, but it's absurdly expensive and I don't know how well it stands upright.

7) If I were to use genetic engineering to create ultra-effective herbal remedies, would anybody's heads explode?

8) In light of the songs being described on Narbonic, I have begun to think that it would be possible to run a mad-science-themed web radio station. Does anybody think that this would be a good idea? I don't know anything about web radio, myself. Has it been replaced by podcasts or something?

9) I have a pink receipt next to me, on the back of which is scribbled, "I hope that, in the future, we will have robotic mannequins that stalk around department stores modeling clothes and striking terror into children." I often leave notes like this to myself, because the insights contained in them seem tremendously important at the time, and they become terrible engimas later. Why on earth was I excited about robot mannequins?

(I can tell that froborr would welcome a technological development of this type, because he hates children. And teenagers.)

10) I don't think about movies very much, but there are two in my mind that I would greatly like to see: a movie in which Jeff Goldblum and Jeffrey Coombs played rival mad scientists, and a collaboration between Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. I'm not sure about the second, though; those two seem like they wouldn't get along. It'd be like mucking with some kinds of animals; they'd fight over dominance.

11) I would like to make it very clear that I oppose dousing elephants with boiling oil, just in case anybody thought that my previous question constituted an endorsement of the same. However, I believe it is possible that elephants may be more boiling-oil-resistant than many other creatures, on account of their size, and that this may be a good thing to keep in mind if you happen to be defending a castle from a herd of elephants. (I have a sneaking suspicion that the oil would only make them very angry.)

12) While I'm busy asking these random questions, I might as well ask: what's the best claymation thingy you've ever seen, aside from Wallace and Gromit? I feel like watching some, at some point.

13) Does anybody know a good resource for identifying the titles of several Escher prints?

14) ...look, does anybody else enjoy trying to jump right as an elevator begins moving upwards, so that the elevator connects with your feet before it feels as if it should do so and everything feels really weird for a moment? No? Just me? Alright, then.

Usenet?

2007-10-17T09:15:57Z

Bluntly: is Usenet still useful for anything? I've been playing with Unison today, and while Unison itself is a nice program, I haven't found all that much that would be worth following regularly.

I was hoping I'd get something science-jobs-related...

Preliminary Weird Biology List

2007-10-17T08:53:27Z

(I'm just posting this quickly before I go to sleep so that I remember to do something with it ~~tomorrow~~ eventually. It is often a good exercise for me to think of the most interesting plants and animals I can, quickly; I suspect that it exposes biases in my assessment of things.)

(Yes, this is preparatory to trying some Real Blogging. Using long articles, because long articles are better for my compositional skills. And no, it is not remotely formatted correctly. I'll edit it ~~tomorrow~~ sometime.)

Victoria amazonica Amazon Water Lilies

They grow up to eight feet across, which is reason enough to include them.

Anomalocaris

A large Cambrian arthropod with very distinct morphological characteristics and uncertain phylogenetic affinity.

Atta Leafcutter Ants

I am very interested in the effect of leafcutter ants on tropical forest dynamics, and the evolution of the ant-fungus relationship. I would also like to map an Atta colony, as they frequently contain millions of members.

Bdellovibrio

A bacterium that parasitizes other bacteria. Tell me that isn't cool.

Bathoscetus cerascetus Beebe's Monster

An abnormally large deepsea fish (six feet long!) known from only two specimens.

Bryopsis plumosa

A siphonous seaweed which possesses a remarkable and inexplicable ability: its cells can, in some instances, survive for ten minutes without a cell membrane. This is an adaptation to predation, and a mechanism for reproduction through fragmentation. After 10 minutes, protoplast-like cells secrete a gel-like substance which protects them until they can develop a true cell membrane.

Caecilians (Gymnophiona?)

Very weird wormlike amphibians about which little is known. This is relevant to the idea that the "worm" architecture is a recurring theme across many animal lineages.

Cave-dwelling Flatworms

Honestly, I don't know a damn thing about them right now. But nobody ever told me they existed.

Cordyceps

The infamous mind-controlling insect-killing fungi.

Darwin Mounds

Odd deep-sea corals. I don't know too much about them, either.

Deinococcus radiodurans

Another famous one, the bacterium that can withstand an absurd amount of radiation. It was discovered in experiments regarding the use of ionizing radiation to sterilize canned ham. It is believed that bacterium's unusual radiation-resistant properties stem from adaptations which allow it to cope with dessication.

Eciton

Army ants. Perhaps I should talk about siafu as well. Very interesting: they can form assemblages composed of living ants (e.g. their nests), have important effects on rainforest ecology (their trailing entourages of mixed foraging flocks), and exhibit a 55° rotational foraging strategy.

Erbenochile

A trilobite with truly fantastic eyes. Must be seen to be believed! We lost something beautiful when the last of the schizochroal eyes departed this earth.

Fig Wasps

The fig wasp has an unusual mutualism with the fig plant.

Flavobacterium Sp. K172

Gained the ability to eat nylon. Interesting implications for xenobiotic metabolism.

Gnotobiotic animals

Also known as "germ-free animals", these are animals with no native microbial flora, delivered by C-section into a sterile environment. They exhibit strange developmental abnormalities.

Golden Wheel Spider

Cartwheels down sand dunes in Namibia, as a means for escaping a parasitoid wasp.

I am not making this up.

Aegagropila linnaei Marimo

A spherical algal assemblage. A sphere is the worst possible shape for plants. Can be easily ordered over the internet and kept in aquaria.

Megascolides

Giant australian earthworms (80cm?). Why are they so big? How do they move?

Mycena lux coeli

Beautiful Japanese mushrooms; these glow green.

Nipponites

An ammonite lineage with bizarrely convoluted shells. It is not clear that they could swim at all; there is some speculation they might have been filter feeders.

Oilbirds

Echolocating tropical birds.

Opabinia

Another anomalous cambrian organism. Has been grouped with Anomalocaris before.

Pelagibacter ubique

A cosmopolitan oceanic bacterium with an extremely simple genome.

Pfiesteria

Neurotoxin-producing dinoflagellate. Really actually predatory. I've looked into culturing them, because owning a vat of toxic algae would be neat. Apparently they are not easy to keep.

Platypuses

Although everybody knows about them, any list of weird biology must contain a platypus.

Wait a minute, I'm not sure I own a stuffed platypus. That's very odd.

Predatory Sponges

Impale prey on spicules.

Predatory Tunicates

Have modified, mouth-like siphons.

Remipedes

Very ancient crustaceans about which we know very little.

Sacculina

Infamous crab parasite. A crustacean, Sacculina produces a rather normal larval form, but discards it upon infecting a crab, forming almost hyphal structures which extend throughout the crab's body. Definitely controls the behavior of its host.

Sticker's Sarcoma

Contagious parasitic cancer found in dogs. Originated in huskies a long time ago. Apparently there is a similar cancer in birds.

Strangler Figs

Strangler figs start their lives as tiny seeds desposited (ideally) on big ol' emergent trees. They grow into epiphytes on branches, and then proceed to envelop the host tree until it dies for lack of light and nutrients-- by which point the strangler fig has become a tree itself. Strangler fig trees are very odd-looking, having a huge number of nooks and crannies in them as a result of spaces between the epiphyte's aerial roots; because their wood is so odd, strangler figs are often the last to be cut down in rainforest clearing. I've often wondered what the molecular biology of strangler figs is like.

Trichoplax adhaerens

It's an animal with four cell types and no organs. We don't know how they reproduce. We don't know how they avoid getting eaten. We're not sure what they're related to, although it looks like the remarkable simplicity of T. adhaerens is a derived characteristic; the lineage used to be more complex than it presently is. They occupy their own cute one-species phylum.

Tardigrades

The previously-mentioned microscopic armored bears that can survive being freeze-dried, or let loose in vacuum. They also occupy their own tiny phylum.

Tribrachidium

A three-armed Ediacaran animal of some type. We know very little about it, as is the case for much of the rest of the Ediacaran fauna. Tribrachidium has a special place in my heart because it was clearly the inspiration for SimEarth's Trichordates. (Trichordates adorn this post.)

As a sharp-eyed froborr pointed out, the inhabitants of the Isle of Man are, in fact, Ediacaran animals similar to Tribrachidium. They couldn't resist alluding to their true nature in the design of their flag...

Tuataras (Sphenodon)

New Zealand reptiles of a lineage older than either snakes or lizards. Among other interesting features, tuataras possess a highly parietal eye in addition to the normal two. This eye actually does have a lens and a cornea and such, even though it's covered with opaque scales and not very useful for seeing with. Tuataras also have long lifespans.

And they are SO CUTE.

Wikipedia informs me that tuataras graced one side of the New Zealand 5-cent coin, which was phased out in October 2006. I need one of these very badly.

Tullimonstrum gregarium Tully Monster

The State Fossil of Illinois, the Tully Monster is just goddamn strange. It's just as weird-looking as opabinia or anomalocaris, but dates from a significantly more recent time period. Nobody has a clue what phylum it belongs to. Interestingly, it was found in another lagerstatten, which makes me wonder whether paleontology in general isn't severely constrained by taphonomic considerations-- maybe EVERYTHING was that weird once.

I ran into the Tully Monster on the side of a U-Haul one day when I was reading about paleontology and helping someone move. This is quite possibly the most bizarre coincidence that has ever occurred in my life.

Whirltooth Shark

I know very, very little about this one, but I've seen a model. It's a prehistoric shark whose teeth grew in a spiral. Again, I am not making this up. The jaw must be seen to be believed, but the internet is not presently obliging.

Hm.

Many obvious flaws in this list.

Not enough plants, or bacteria-- and my knowledge is still quite limited.

Here's an idea: you guys pick one critter off this list, and I'll research it and come back with a long post about it. How does that sound? I guess you can use the comments to vote on what you want to read about.

It'll give me practice for writing Actual Essays.

Book Meme: Everyone else is doing it

2007-10-13T01:06:18Z

Or at least froborr and siliconrose and benabik are...

These are the top 200 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (when this list was made). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Each book is followed by the number of times it has been marked "unread".

I'm not a very literary person, and I don't do much reading anymore (not fiction, at any rate), so the results probably aren't very interesting.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch 22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79) (I got up to Chapter 4 before Reed intervened. I think aris_tgd has my copy now.)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73) (Of course...)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods : a novel (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West … (65) (Read large chunks of it in the GMU bookstore, IIRC.)
The Canterbury tales (64) (Can't remember which bits anymore.)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61) (One of my all-time favorites.)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys : a novel (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
~~Dune (51)~~ (I thought it was absolutely terrible. The style seemed dry enough to match the subject.)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51) (It was good! It should finish it.)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51) (I would read it if my copy hadn't vanished into the enigmatic sinkhole that is the basement.)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved : a novel (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49) (I think this book is not as good if you happen to start reading it in the middle.)
The scarlet letter (48) (Rappaccini's Daughter was much better.)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47) (Another one of my favorite books.)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47) (I would love to finish this if it weren't in the basement somewhere.)
Cloud atlas : a novel (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46) (hmm.... I wonder if we have a copy around...)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of… (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into … (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44) (I probably shouldn't count this. It's a terrible book to try to read furtively in a bookstore.)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its … (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)
Cold mountain (43)
Robinson Crusoe (43)
The bell jar (43)
The secret life of bees (43)
Beowulf : a new verse translation (43)
The plague (43)
The Master and Margarita (43)
Atonement : a novel (42)
The handmaid's tale (42) (Creepier than Oryx and Crake, IMHO.)
Lady Chatterley's lover (41)
Underworld (41)
Little Women (41)
A brief history of time : from the big bang to black holes (41)
Stardust (41)
Jude the obscure (41)
The chronicles of Narnia (40)
Possession : a romance (40)
Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal (40)
Never let me go (40)
The trial (40)
Kafka on the shore (40)
Bleak House (40)
Sons and lovers (40)
Alias Grace (39)
The Arabian nights (39) (I am not counting abridged versions, and if I am reading the whole thing I would strongly prefer to try the Husain Haddawy translation rather than Burton.)
Baudolino (39)
Confessions (39) (*cracks up at the recollection of "I don't even like pears!"*)
The great Gatsby (39)
To kill a mockingbird (39)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Gla… (39) (I can no longer recall how much of this I have read.)
The alchemist (39)
Candide, or, Optimism (39)
Snow falling on cedars (39)
Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story (39)
Midnight's children (39)
White Oleander (39)
A passage to India (39)
The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and … (39) (I own this, but haven't touched it... I'm betting Hyperspace is better, honestly.)
The house of the seven gables (39)
The lovely bones : a novel (38)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (38)
The amber spyglass (38)
The histories (38) (Which histories? I'm going to be lazy and assume Herodotus.)
Swann's way (38)
The shadow of the wind (38)
Fahrenheit 451 (38)
Good omens (38)
Running with scissors : a memoir (38)
Everything is illuminated : a novel (38)
The divine comedy (38)
Paradise lost (38)
The English patient (38)
Uncle Tom's cabin (38)
The Origin of Species (37) (No, I have not read even a little bit. For shame!)
The plot against America (37)
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling (37)
Silas Marner (37)
The hours (37)
Prodigal summer : a novel (37)
The bonesetter's daughter (37)
Doctor Zhivago (37)
The shipping mews (36)
The phantom of the Opera (36)
The portrait of a lady (36)
Blink : the power of thinking without thinking (36)
Heart of darkness (36) (Another favorite.)
The Robber Bride (36)
The last of the Mohicans (36) (If I had the guts and skill, I would write like Fenimore Cooper.)
The age of innocence (36)
The system of the world (35)
Tropic of cancer (35)
The mayor of Casterbridge (35)
The Gormenghast novels (35)
~~The gunslinger (35)~~
The golden compass (35)
The Republic of Plato (35) (It was very good, and I need to reread it.)
The remains of the day (35)
Cat's eye (35)
Eragon (35)
A game of thrones (35)
Sophie's world : a novel about the history of philosophy (34)
The island of the day before (34)
The good earth (34)
A prayer for Owen Meany : a novel (34)
The devil in the white city : murder, magic, and madness at … (34)
A farewell to arms (34)
East of Eden (34)
The book thief (34)
Animal farm : a fairy story (34) (I read parts of it in a bookstore at Haverford, but can't remember how much and am not counting it.)

Go Team Sea Slug!

2007-10-10T22:31:25Z

1) How difficult would it be to create an organization that would buy the rights to old programs, publish the source code, open them up as open-source projects, and offer them for download? Possibly it could work in quasi-PBS model: those donating money would then be allowed to vote on the next piece of software to acquire. While this was probably a feasibly idea a few years ago, present awareness of the value of old games in particular makes this a problematic idea. The prices might be too high.

2) How long does it take to kill an elephant via dousing with boiling oil?

3) If you're dying of hypothermia (very slowly, maybe) and happen to have a hot fudge sundae on hand, is it a good idea to eat the sundae? On the one hand, it probably has a lot of calories in it, but on the other hand, it's pretty cold already...

4) A long time ago, I made a list of things wearable computers might be good for. I can't find the list, but I can remember it pretty well, so I'm pretty sure I'm not making it up. At any rate, my major idea was that wearable computers were probably not going to become widespread by giving us Terminator-like displays of peoples' names in case we'd forgotten them; rather, I thought they'd eventually be used to replace or augment devices we already carried. (Doing this would clearly allow new functions to arise as agglomerations or extensions of previously-required stuff.) One of the items on the list was "wallet", which I thought might be replaced if we went further with the adoption of electronic currency already signified by credit cards. I never thought this would happen, and this shaves much closer to it than I thought possible.

I still don't think we'll be seeing "keys" anytime soon.

5) Ah, Second Life. How you intrigue and terrify me.

6) Why do I like Azumanga Daioh so much? Answer: Because Azumanga Daioh is a very accurate depiction of what I wish life were like.

Also, as misshepshu points out, I am Osaka.

7) If you were going to create a spherical clock, readable from any direction, how would you do it?

For The Wii-Enabled

2007-09-29T04:38:52Z

My Wii Code is 2524 3848 9271 9084.

Other contact information will have be handled on a more secure basis, I'm afraid.

More random notes

2007-09-28T04:52:49Z

The content of this post is really intended more for myself than for other people, but I'm sticking it here so that I remember it.

1) What is the legal basis of the idea that foreign nationals have no rights? Is there such a basis?

2) You know how brushing your teeth and then drinking orange juice results in a really awful sort of bitter taste? Why does that happen?

3) I've done programming of some variety several times in my life-- nothing terribly sophisticated, but always enjoyable. However, when it comes to writing things on my own, I'm always stymied by three things: 1) ignorance of existing APIs, 2) unfamiliarity with programming environments (e.g. XCode), and 3) uncertainty over the best way to structure longer, more complicated programs. Does anybody know any very good way to overcome these obstacles?

4) What regulates the transcription of rRNAs? How does a cell decide it needs more ribosomes?

5) While I possess a general problem with regard to aggregating information from RSS feeds, there is a particular concern with Seed's ScienceBlogs. Most of the ones I've seen are good! How am I to know which posts are the most interesting?

...I've been thinking about an RSS client designed specifically for handling more news than you could possibly read. It certainly wouldn't use an email-like "unread items" display, because it would assume most articles to be unread. It would probably be more useful for such a program to keep track of what you wind up reading instead. I don't know how it would decide which articles to present. A random sample of the available pool? Bayesian analysis? Cluster analysis? Some kind of neural network? AideRSS is supposed to already do this, to some extent, but I'd rather have a dedicated client, as usual. Something in me just hates the idea of doing everything through a web browser.

6) If the US Presidential candidates were Transformers, what would they transform into? (This falls into the class of "stupid questions my brain latches onto because it can't think of a good answer.")

7) I would like to take this opportunity to note that burrow owls do, in fact, live in holes. In the ground. (As noted here.)

8) I'm very pleased to observe the proliferation of portable defibrillators, and I'm impressed that we now have ones designed for home use. These are expensive, and I hope the price comes down. Wouldn't it be great if we could come up with something like that for strokes?

9) The Anomalocaris Wikipedia page is in serious need of extension and repair. I feel that the "Popular Culture" section should definitely be restored, as Anomalocaris is an obscure invertebrate and its use in popular media is thus unusual and noteworthy. (...and I found anomalocarids in Skies of Arcadia, and I want to mention that.) I'd like to try fixing this page as soon as I get my books on the Cambrian back, and can obtain Conway Morris' original monograph on the subject. It wouldn't be much, seeing as I don't know what work is being done on these species currently, but it would be a lot better than what's there.

10) I have mountains of paper dating back to middle school in the basement. These are mostly unsorted. Actually sorting these papers would be a far more tedious filing task than any of the ones I've mentioned on this blog so far, but there's probably a lot of things in there that I'd like to keep. Additionally, it's rather likely that I'll inherit all the family records from both sides of my family, as every other candidate for this task would probably throw them out. Neither of these facts makes me very happy. Despite what's written in the rest of my blog, I don't enjoy archiving things-- I just find it to be an essential adaptation for dealing with large numbers of documents. Spatial disorganization has cost me so dearly in the past that I can no longer tolerate it. (If I could just master temporal organization as well, I'd be set for life.)

I'd like to create a library dedicated to archiving personal documents-- diaries, scrapbooks, photo albums, home movies, etc. For a small, one-time fee, the library would look after the things you don't want to throw away but can't afford to keep. For another fee, it would digitize them and send you the digital copies. Digital storage density keeps getting higher and higher, so saving old documents or movies in digital form is much more practical than saving physical copies. Of course, there are issues with that, too-- what are things going to be like when you can read every email your great-grandfather ever wrote? are changes in proprietary formats going to render the past inaccessible?-- but those are topics for a different post.

The library would have to take some precautions to avoid losing its collection, and it would have to create a novel filing scheme. I imagine that library items would be available within the library only, and would not be checked out. A library can replace a published book, but it can't replace a diary.

I don't know, I think it could work.

11) An aphorism-like statement that has been running through my head for some time now:

The worst thing about life is the way it stops when you wish it would keep going. The second-worst thing about life is the way it keeps going when you wish it would stop.

Moose Hairs

2007-09-19T21:18:38Z

A while ago, I had a dream in which one of the characters, a bug-eyed wild-haired sort of cartoon individual (I think he had a long, pointy beard, too), won an argument about economics by taking off a hat or something to reveal enormous sword-like 2-foot-long eyebrows extending well past his face. He simultaneously exclaimed, "Moose hairs! I got 'em!". The first two words were said in a loud, staccato-ish fashion: "MOOSE! HAIRS! (beat) I got 'em!".

This happened several times throughout the dream. The moose-hair argument was apparently a very powerful one.

Later characters were (this was clearly stated, in the dream) sculpted from dryer lint. However, this didn't change their appearance at all.

.....so I, uh, just thought I'd let you know that, is all.

Yeah.

Beetles and Cars

2007-09-15T06:04:34Z

Now that I'm almost-sort-of getting the hang of this blogging thing-- which may a good thing, or possibly a very, very bad thing-- I think I would like to point out this article, which details the (hopefully) unusual reasons for the decimation of a stag beetle subspecies in southern Turkey. I wish that I could read this and think, "Oh my, that's very strange. It's not emblematic of the way contemporary human beings regard the natural world at all, not even a little bit."

While I'm at it, I suppose I might as well mention something else. This excerpt is from an article about a new car design. The car itself is very boring, but the impetus behind the new design was rather interesting:

"We interviewed a lot of people who are 15 to 17 years old in countries from around the world," Bancon told Reuters, adding there were hundreds of youths taking part in in-depth surveys from across Europe, Japan, the United States and even China.

"We just tried to understand who these future consumers are," he added, noting that Nissan's survival in the future with such changing market conditions is not something anyone was taking for granted.

"We found out that these people are not interested in cars. So we were kind of surprised."

Bancon said their study found that teenagers have fallen out of love with the car and view it as a noisy, messy throwback to the last century.

I would classify this under "Fascinating If True." I suppose there's no law of behavior stating that teenagers must be enamored with automobiles, but it didn't look to me like an association in danger of dissolving anytime soon.

I still spend far, far too much time reading stuff like this.