Past tense, future perfect

It's all moist and weird in there...

2008-02-27T03:03:00.001-08:00

Thinking about thinking about thinking...

I don't know how to handle my own mind.

--Which is to say, my mind works in ways that are mysterious even (especially?) to me. Furthermore, the more in examine my mind, the deeper I probe, the odder it feels.

I think there some kind of equivocation here about odd and peculiar vs unfamiliar. Both are synonymous with "strange." But the more accurate meaning is probably the latter, in that the deepest recesses and mechanisms of my psyche are not thoroughly reconnoitered yet. Unfortunately the

Earn a living?

2008-02-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
--Mark Twain

Okay, granted. But walking down Pike Street the other day I was struck by what a monstrous thought the concept of "earning a living" really is. I was coming out of the QFC and it occurred to me that I the checker who'd helped me does that for hundreds of people every day: it's his job, as my job is mine, and it's how he earns his living. Then I thought, that's sick! You don't earn a living. You have one or you don't. If you don't, you're probably not reading this. If you do then you have a whole set of problems to deal with if you want to maintain it, but you haven't earned it.

I finance my living through my job, but what work I do or don't do doesn't determine whether I've justified my existence. I suppose in a hunter-gatherer sense one can earn one's continued sustenance. But...the prevailing work ethic seems to be that sans some value-added employment one hasn't earned a living.

I reject this.

There are other metrics of a person's value to a society, but I don't think one can earn living. Nor do I think that value to society should be considered in determining whether someone should be permitted to continue to live. Again, living is something not a possession but a quality, not to be earned, and not to be revoked. It's not granted by anyone or anything except the happy accident of your birth and all the things that haven't killed you up until now. I suppose one can choose to forfeit living, but it's not something that can be justly taken by anyone.

(Good iff !Bad) = True (!)

2008-01-31T12:23:00.000-08:00

I am no longer nearly a week behind in my homework. Not bad, therefore good!
I have a computer that works. Good!
I have a bunch of work to be done with my roomies to get our house in order. Not bad! Actually kind of fun.
I'm seeing Gordy on Friday. Good!
Not having to pay for the Microsuck software (Visual Studio.NET 2005) I've had to install for my classes. Not bad...so good...I guess. I think 3.8GB is excessive for pretty much any program, though. Yes, it's an IDE and enormously powerful, but GCC doesn't take up that much fucking disk space and manages to get by just fine, thank you very much. But at least no money went from me or to Microsoft, so that's not bad. So it's good.
I'm going to NYC in June to hang out naked for a week. Excellent!

All's well, I guess. At least nothing is critically wrong, and that's a leg up if I've ever had one.

Wait...what's this? A hole in the crotch of my pants? How does this shit happen to me?

Khayah is in the [new] hizzouse

2008-01-23T15:01:00.000-08:00

Man I'm so awesome. I put my underwear on inside out and sideways this morning and didn't even notice until almost 1pm.

Man I'm so tired. After months of truly gruelling searching, Jack and I have found a new place to live that completely exceeds our expectations, with an awesome housemate to boot. That's right, we found a stranger who is cooler to live with than nobody at all...on the Internet! The house is an unpretentious 3-bedroom gig on MLK off Union. It's cute and about four times the size of our apartment. What a relief! The roomie is a bespectacled, dark-haired scientist named David who is not played by Jeff Goldblum (to my mild disappointment) . It would be fair to say that Jack and I are somewhat in awe of him. I'm sure it will wear off, but the truth is he's kinda living the dream and we both really respect that. He's also a giant nerd and seems pretty fun. Nevertheless, as I have stated before, the social awkwardness in a room increases exponentially with the number of geeks in said room, and this makes the icebreaking that is normally a little awkward with new roomies that much stiffer. Ah, well.

We found out on Friday morning that we got the place, and my friend volunteered her van on Monday, so I spent the "weekend" busting my ass to pack up the whole house in like a day and a half. It's pretty much done, except for my bed that has a stuck screw delaying its disassembly and a couple baskets of clothes. And the cats, who are staying behind until the very last trip to prevent their running away. Until then, we're in limbo, sleeping on the floor at what is now "Nick's Place" to babysit the cats while all our stuff is half a mile away. I can't wait for everything to be settled in and unpacked. I cannot wait for a return to order. Man, all my books are just stacked in boxes arranged by size! It's a good thing I used sticky labels to facilitate their being returned to Dewey decimal order.

I miss using real dishes. Paper plates suck. I miss my microwave. I miss being able to browse LotR or Ender's Game whenever I feel like it, and in such tumultuous days as these, that would be a real comfort.

Not much else has happened in the last few days, except I made up a truly excellent bad joke:
Q: What did the polynomial say to the Distributive Property?
A: "Zounds! FOILed again!"

Aw, I kill myself.

Hey Seattle: Why didn't your mother teach you any manners?

2008-01-16T15:09:00.000-08:00

Maybe this is a problem everywhere, but it seems like people in Seattle are exorbitantly casual. Not only do we dress, as a comic in The Stranger once put it, as if we're going to be sleeping outside. We have excessively lax attitudes about punctuality, and put dangerously low emphasis on the RSVP and courtesy call.

Seriously, Seattle: is it that bloody hard to call back when you say you will? Even if it's just to say no.

Sample conversation:
"Hey, this is 'Seattleite.' I got your message, and I can't make it that night, but thanks for the invitation."
"Okay, thanks, we'll know not to save you a seat. See you later!"
"Later! Bye."
"Bye."

Isn't that better for everyone?

Blimey.

I have a date on Friday.

2008-01-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

This almost never happens, for many reasons.

I've been making fun of myself for a couple months, about how I'm too busy graphing esoteric things, or taking a red pen to badly spelt graffiti, or whatever it is that I do on Friday nights that keeps using them up. It would be funnier if it weren't mostly true (and I have the graphs to prove it). I've also been kind of avoiding dating. In the last six months, I've had three false starts. Two never got off the ground, because I just didn't even want to try. (One of them resulted in the aforementioned destruction of JANE. Lesson learned: never accept a date when you'd already planned a night of configuring your computer, like I did. It's trading a sure thing for a risky thing, and you probably won't come out ahead.) The other began too slowly, then accelerated too quickly and burnt out. Then I was fending off way-inappropriate advances from my not-quite-divorced coworker whose wife works in the same department...yuck. The evidence of boys' trips to Jupiter to get more stupider was mounting, and I was unimpressed.

I've been really apprehensive about dating anyone lately. I don't know if I'm overemphasizing how important it is to me that socialising not interfere with school. It seems like erring on the side of scholarship would be the wise thing to do. I'm also kind of disappointed with people, and it makes me reluctant to forge new relationships of any kind. It just gets so wearying to meet somebody and get excited about them, just to discover that you saw all the good parts in the first five minutes, like the trailer for a mediocre movie. This is part of why I have few friends, but good ones. And never go on dates.

But I "met" someone who seems, from what little I know about her, to be a really active, self-posessed girl who likes a bunch of the things I like, and a bunch of others that it'd be fun to learn about. I can't see how anything worse could happen than my making a new friend, and she's pretty cute to boot. My friends have never gotten kidnapped meeting people from the Internet, so I'm going to give it a try. It also totally helps that she made the first move, sparing me the agony of exposing my total lack of cool with girls I like. I'm almost as suave as a 13-year-old junior varsity wrestler with an overbite.

Wish me luck.

Geek dating: It's not just for sketch comedy anymore.

2008-01-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

"You're a geek girl, Khayah, and that makes you a commodity. But remember, while the odds may be good, the goods may be odd."
--A precocious, intoxicated 22-year-old software engineer at a party in September, before petitioning me to take his virginity (I declined)

I've been gloriously single for about eight months, nearly half the total time I've been single since I was 16. The beginning of this period coincided with my resumption of being a giant science dork. Politics is not as endemically male-dominated as the sciences, at least not in the arenas I was working in (not that that's saying much). I have already experienced a little culture shock. To say you work for a non-profit working on universal health care is not so unusual. Saying you're a physics major considering a minor in mathematics or computer science, I have found, strikes some people as a non sequitur. They expect even less for me to say I want to do experimental particle physics, rather than video game design or something.

Maybe part of this is just that people who say they want to go to school for a good chunk of a decade just for a not particularly lucrative career in research is unusual. I can't help suspect, however, that it's partly because I'm a girl. This isn't diatribe about how old white bald men in glasses and ties are keeping me down. Being a female geek affects dating dynamics in ways I hadn't considered when I inhabited the more gender-balanced world of political activism.

Look at this picture of students at the US Particle Accelerator School in 2005:
[Source: http://uspas.fnal.gov/photopage.htm]

What do you see? Dudes! And one girl. This is an arrangement that never occurs in nature.

As a serious and ambitious student, school is my foremost priority. As a multiply-burned hopeless romantic, I'm a little reluctant to consider dating anyone. As a geek, I'm often in groups with severely skewed gender ratios full of brilliant guys I can really relate to. And as a seething ball of barely post-adolescent hormones, I'm horny and tempted as hell.

The problem with most people is that they're almost never as awesome as they seem for the first week. Intellect is often immediately evident and is a huge turn-on (sophophilia is the word for it), but there are so many ways even really smart people can suck and/or be really boring. I've found that simply waiting a couple weeks makes it easier for people to dig themselves into a hole of stupid or asshole or whatever, thus anaesthetising me to the sexiness of their brains.

Maybe my point was not about geek dating after all, if avoiding it is what's really on my mind. And this doesn't even begin to integrate the double-awkwardness of being a geek girl attracted to women while being all awkward around hot ones. I could give Koothrapalli on The Big Bang Theory a run for his money. *sigh*

Hoppin' on the bandwagon.

2008-01-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

So today's xkcd has popularised the google search term "died in a blogging accident" in to an insane degree. My first thought was surprise that anybody had died in a blogging accident. (It never occured to me even for an instant that Randall Munroe might be making up statistics. Surely not!) Anyway, I googled it and came up with a million (Well, ~7400) pages of people talking about people searching for "died in a blogging accident." Then I decided that people were boring and unoriginal, and I was one of them.

So I searched "died in a logging accident," hoping that Google would suggest "Did you mean 'died in a blogging accident'?"
Alas, no.

Lots of people have died in logging accidents, by the way, and there's nothing funny about it.

*********************************************

I think about Google a lot. I'm pretty sure this is not normal. Yesterday, I learned about a particularly bizarre one of Srinivasa Ramanujan's identities: 1+2+3+4+5+...+n = -1/12(R). Bizarre. Impossible, right? When the equation is rephrased as 1/1^-1 + 1/2^-1 + 1/3^-1+...+ 1/n^-1 = -1/12(R) it starts to seem less counterintuitive. Ramanujan's identities are so eerily beautiful, and this one would be my answer to #12 on the GLAT.

In other, sadder, news, there are more Americans who think the moon landing was faked than running Mac OS and Linux combined.

It's nice not to have to repeat math

2008-01-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

Been back in school for a week now, and by a miracle of persistence combined with at least one awesome teacher, I got all the classes I needed. If I hadn't gotten into any one of them, it would have cut my financial aid and kept me from going to any. But I got them all! My books are like $400 this quarter, and I had to get them all new. But it's okay. I'm back in school! This quarter is PreCalc I, Intro to VB, and Technical Writing.

My being enrolled in this VB class entitles me to get Visual Studio.NET Professional for free! I'm going to pick it up tomorrow.

It's hard to resist the urge to ask "Is there an Open Source version?" or "Can I get that to run under WINE?" But I do.

Information Society was as good as I'd expected, and not nearly as good as I'd hoped. But I knew that Kurt Harland had turned into and old[er] computer geezery type guy since 1990, and they were neither as old nor as slow as I'd feared. It was fun. Brian hung out with the band after the show, but I went to bed.

Hmm...now that I have essays to write and problem sets due, I'm finding I have less energy for spontaneously doing the exercises in my old logic book and less to say about random entertaining bullshit. It's good that now that energy is channeled into something that is not merely productive (like the logic proofs), but that other people will view as beneficial, eg earning degrees. I'll try to keep blogging at least once a week, though. I know that I'm always happy to go back and read what I've thought about stuff, even if nobody else ever glances at it.

Avery and illicit public art: it's a winning combination!

2008-01-02T18:35:00.000-08:00

I used Avery 5163 White Shipping Labels to make "Tux has a posse" stickers. Here they are as a Google doc, for your "copying and pasting" enjoyment (lol pun). They're not great, but I'm happy enough. I referred to the Wikipedia entry on Gentoo penguins for the stats for height and weight, although I realise than in very sad and lonely circles this could be a controversial choice. So shoot me.

The first day of the quarter was unusually lame, but ultimately all right. Andy McCone, my programming prof, seems pretty awesome. Fortunately his was the last class I attended on campus. I visited the Financial aid office the sixth, seventh, and eighth times today, finally getting them to process my file despite my mother's signature being missing from a single document. Why couldn't they have told me that was the problem any of the first seven times I talked to them? Who knows. But my aid award will be adequate to cover my tuition and books, with maybe 50 bucks left over, which is certainly sufficient. It's about freaking time!

My brother is here in town this week and week after next, which is awesome. He's coming to the InSoc show with me, too, along with Brian and Sarah. Khayah has a posse!

Self-Titled

2007-12-31T09:24:00.000-08:00

I have a number of appellations, and I think the origins of all of them are interesting:

Khayah Delaine Brookes is the name given to me by my mother. She chose my forename years before I was born, when she read in article that mentioned some celebrity naming his daughter Chaya or something. She like the name and experimented with spellings until she found one she thought was aesthetically pleasing. It's a Hebrew name, derived from L'Chaim, which means "to life!" (Remember The Fiddler on the Roof? Yeah, like that.) My surname is constructed from my mother's first name: both my brother and I were named after her the same way Leif Erikson was named after Erik the Red. My middle name is my godmother's middle name. I like having a Hebrew first name, a French middle name, and a Welsh last name when I am probably none of these by descent!

repressed_genius was my first e-mail alias. It was inspired by the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which the peasant, Dennis, shouts "Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!" It's self-deprecating, of course.

Zephyr Greene was the nom de plume I invented my freshman year of high school. I learned the word zephyr from a Dinotopia novel, and it began what has become an lifelong affection for interesting words for different kinds of wind: corrado, scirocco, passat, chinook...I collect them as I go along. Greene I chose because I wanted to use colour as well as maintain the same metre as my own name. My mother suggested the final e, which I like because I think it looks more ephemeral. For a few months I pretended to run an underground political group which I referred to as the ZGO, or Zephyr Greene Omission. I thought this was a great joke, because there was, after all, no such person as Zephyr Greene. The July before my sophomore year the ZGO organised one subversive, radical event: a Be-In at Belfair State Park which one other person attended. It didn't make even the localest of papers, even though I called them with a press release. We really showed The Man that day. I still have a couple of the flyers.

BloodyMuse was a name I used for a while, but have mostly abandoned lately. It's simply an anagram of "Moody Blues," a band I particularly liked in tenth grade.

Lastly, I occasionally refer to myself as The Rev. I was ordained by the Universal Life Church on 22 August 2002, and while I seldom invoke any of the rights due to me as a "man of the cloth," e.g. better parking spaces, I like to use the title now and again. When I get my PhD you can sure as hell bet I'll request to be addressed as the Reverend Doctor Khayah Delaine Brookes.

Gmail, fanmail, and letters to your senator: a Call to Action!

2007-12-28T13:17:00.001-08:00

I love Gmail. Every time my available storage space increases by 30%, I feel like writing a fan letter. This has happened three times since this summer. It's fucking exponential! I now have 6.1GB. That's like a whole PC hard drive in 1995.

Speaking of fan mail, this guy has the coolest blog I've ever seen. He's developing a Grand Unification Theory on his own, in his spare time, while working some weak day job. I don't know if he's just talking out of his ass or if he's on to something significant; I just like his gumption. He never has any comments on his posts, and I sincerely hope that it's because his friends and colleagues write out arguments by hand or something, then talk to him IRL about his ideas. I hope it's not because he has no readers. Other than me.
It is certain that he has a major beef with Alan Ginsparg, a man who I'm sure never expected to see his own face superimposed on the body of Big Bird on an amateur cosmologists blog.

Cosmology is at a very interesting and awkward stage, while particle physics is really taking off. We're about to shake the Higgs boson about of the WSOGMM (Whole Sort of General Mish Mash), hopefully, which will do a lot for supersymmetry's standing as a valid model (or fuck it over if we don't find it!). I really hope the research we do with the LHC clarifies the weirdness we've been looking at the last couple decades, and helps us drop such mathematical parlour tricks as renormalisation, or subtracting infinities from each other to make the equations come out tidy. String theory--is strange. As charmed as I am by Dr. Brian Greene (quark jokes aside), I simply do not have the math to know whether I should be taking string theory seriously. I'm unnerved by one aspect of it, though: the practise of adding extra dimensions until it comes out right reminds me of the astronomers who kept adding epicycles to the Ptolemaic model. I don't know how we can test string theory, either. (These are the things I'm going to college to find out.) But I think this is a crucial and exciting time, and I wouldn't be surprised by a working GUT within my lifetime.

There are so few facilities at which I can study particle physics in this country. I hear rumours of linear accelerators at Western or Evergreen, but I can't find any references to these apparatus on the schools' respective websites, and I'd imagine that they'd be happy to show and tell. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL, if you remember) has petitioned the Bush administration to not cut funding for high-energy physics by the $88 million proposed for 2008, which both kills domestic HEP research and our participation in international projects. In other words, it makes the US less interesting and look dumber to the other scientific communities, as well as retarding progress. But I bet the Bushies think the only physics they need to worry about is the law of gravity, and only because they need it to bomb.

Please join me in writing to our state reps in urging them to support funding for major physics research projects and facilities.
Email Senator Patty Murray
Email Senator Maria Cantwell
Email Representative Jim McDermott (he's my rep, anyway)
Email Representative Norm Dicks (for my Bremerton homies)

Oh, and by the way: CERN invented the World Wide Web. Remember that the next time you feel like moaning "What has physics ever done for me?"

I've allowed my love of gravy to distract from my prescriptivist linguistic crusade! or, Why I have no use for Mensa

2007-12-26T17:19:00.000-08:00

I've said it before: there's nothing like going back to Belfair for a holiday to remind you what a terrible place it it. My aunt's road washed out in the flooding, and her driveway has become a ravine 3 feet deep. It takes four-wheel drive to get to her place now. The next day (25 December) it snowed, trapping me and my mom in the house and unable to attend the Mageop party at Arynn's place I'd been dying to go to. I will never again take for granted that the worst transportation issue I have to deal with here is the 11 running ten minutes late.

On the bright side, the snow did enable me to participate in one Mageop tradition I hadn't expected: I made a pair of snow-boobs in my mother's driveway.

Things I have learned from the Internet: Mensa does not seem to have personal/community pages. How can I find a doctoral student in structural linguistics to rent my spare bedroom? Where do I find somebody to buy my couch for the price determined by game theory and the local microeconomic climate be optimal to both of us? What if my girlfriend and I want to have a threesome with a Nobel laureate? Damn you, Mensa: you have done nothing to make my life easier!

It also irks me that their Membership Benefits page says "a myriad of." "Myriad" is more properly used as an adjective, not a noun: "the myriad forces," rather than "the myriad of forces." I think that the Mensa website should avoid using tertiary definitions of words when the primary one is more poetic and more etymologically correct. But this particular usage has always been a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I should stop bothering with this when there are delicious leftover sweet potatoes to be eaten.

I've made a bunch of stickers that say "W W I B W/O I.B.M.?" to put up around, to share my excitement over the InSoc concert with the world.

Antici...pation!

2007-12-20T19:06:00.000-08:00

Inforfuckingmation Society!

Hell motherfucking yes!

I'm not sure what I'm more excited about: the quarter starting in less than two weeks, the InSoc concert on the 6th, or the sourdough starter waiting for me to attend to it in my kitchen. Actually, I am sure. The above are obviously in descending order of imminent awesomeness.

I am also working on a "Tux has a posse" sticker. Look for it soon on various flattish surfaces around town. I first decided to make such a sticker several days ago, but didn't get my butt in gear on making it until today, when running across some of Banksy's art that I'd saved and forgotten about reminded me.

Squigglies of the world untie!

Old year's revelations

2007-12-19T13:17:00.000-08:00

New year's resolutions are notoriously disregarded and eventually discarded: just ask any sales rep at a fitness center. 2008, I believe, is set up so well for me that all I have to do is not fuck it up. This is largely because of things I have accomplished and learned during 2007, which I declared portentously back in January to be "The Year of Me." Hence, I have compiled a list of things I simply need to remember.

1. Don't fucking talk to me about it: do it!
A close relative of "Show me the money!" This applies to myself as much as to other people. Dreams are great, but they're worthless without the deeds to back them up. It's also fun to shout this into the phone before hanging up on people who are taking five minutes to explain why they're going to call you right back.

2. Trust your gut.
If it doesn't seem right, it's probably not. Job seem too good to be true? Boyfriend's story smell of fish? Back away, not today, disco lady! The worst coping skill I learned as a child was to pretend that everything was as good as it pretended to be, rather than as shite as it really was. Now I know to call a spade a spade, or even a muddy shovel.

3. Dump him!
This applies to anybody not at least as awesome as me.

I am frequently envious of people who don't become entangled and/or easily extricate themselves from personal and professional relationships with less-than-excellent persons. Maybe it's the lingering remnants of my grade school dorkiness that permits me to still become involved with marginal people, out of a combination of compassion and empathy. But there are serious problems with picking up lost puppies. I'm currently farming out those I still have and have put a freeze on further applications.

4. Carry an extra pair of socks in your backpack.
I have never regretted doing this. Whether the weather is hot, cold, or wet, an extra pair of socks is worth its weight in Tinactin.

5. There is no glamour in starving.
Money is far from being the root of all evil. It is probably the most useful thing on the planet. I will never again scorn somebody simply for having money. I'm still kind of a socialist, though: my kids will go to public school, but I will ensure that they need never worry about how to pay for college, or a doctor, or a pair of decent shoes. I do believe it's perfectly within a state's responsibilities to make sure the former two are guaranteed. Funny, back when I owned nothing I had a much more Libertarian economic philosophy, but now that I've earned some stuff I don't want anybody else to have to struggle through the same kind of crap I went through.

Merry Mageop, my friends, and many happy returns!

Memory Lane is in my ears and in my eyes...

2007-12-16T21:16:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours this weekend at my mom's house, packing up the detritus of my teens that remains cluttering up my old room.

Revelation #1:
I must have been the most insufferable hippie in high school!

To those of you who knew me then, I apologise.

Now, I still lead a fairly Bohemian lifestule (as I write this, I'm naked in the living room of my friends' house in Bremerton, half-watching Ghandi with Zac as we converse about the woeful lack of public outrage at our country's continuing war in Iraq and wait for a pizza). But you can be the hippest, most loose-hanging ultraliberal or whatever without being a fucking hippie. I can understand why I was, but now that I am not so naive I am dismayed that I believed that hippieism is a particularly valid..."path," for lack of a better word, or an attractive lifestyle, or that it is even remotely without pretense. I have some friends who are hippies yet. I hope they grow out of it.

Revelation #2:
I was a fucking awesome kid. Smart as a bowl full of apples (the most intelligent fruit) and clever and funny to boot. I'd totally hang out with me now, which is way more than I can say for most kids.

The coolest relics I came across were the notes I took from the time I interviewed PAt Cashman for Career Day in fifth grade, and a printout my mom must have made of the first e-mail I ever sent. Surreal.

2007-12-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

Today's quote is brought to you by the letter μ and the number e:

"Little insights help bigger ideas click. Happy math."

Dot, Bot, Dot, Bot, Red, Red, Red

2007-12-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

Be still, my girlish heart: JANE is back! Although, with her partial brain transplant, I suppose I should rename her. 2Jane seems appropriate. It's hard to find good female names for computers.

I'm pretty psyched about the quarter starting. Maths, Physics, Programming and UNIX are on my plate for Winter quarter. In just 6 quarters I'll have ATSs in physics and computer science. Then my bachelor's will be in physics, and my fearsome skillz with computer modeling of high-energy reactions will make me an analytical force to be reckoned with. (Or a reckoning force to be analysed? ...No, the first one's better.)
Still not sure whether particle physics or cosmology tickles my fancy more, but I do know that the next couple decades are going to be full of new opportunities for experimentalists in both of these overlapping fields. (Insert Michael Faraday joke here)

I'm also very excited about the Information Society concert on January 6th. 1,000,000 watts of awesome! El Corazon, all ages, bar w/ ID, $18. I'm bringing Brian Moritz and Sarah Waye.

I found a webcomic called Toonbots. I like it a lot. But I'm not sure if it's funny.

In conclusion, America is a land of contrasts

2007-12-12T17:35:00.000-08:00

Florida SUCKS!!!!!

But you can have a fucking great time there!

Richard, Arynn's and my host for the last week, took us to a few awesome nudist places in and around Ft. Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale was probably the worst place I'd ever been, until we drove around Miami. Drivers are idiots, old people are everywhere, young people look either plastic or dangerous, Jeb Bush is governor. It's fucking terrible. But the local florae and faunae are terrific. The plants all look eerily prehistoric, and the rampancy of tiny geckos and weird-ass birds is equally alien. The geckos are too hard to catch, but I'm sure they wouldn't have tasted very good anyway (for some reason I wanted to eat everything that moved).

We got up early each morning, went out to the nudist destination du jour, swam, sunbathed, hiked nature trails, collected shells or fossils when they were around. Arynn and I battled the Atlantic for a few hours on a nude beach in Hallandale until we grew tired, declared victory, and built a schizophrenic little sandcastle. Occasionally young black Jamaicans or old white businessmen would hit on us.

One resort was full of French Canadians, more than I think I've ever seen before. It also had a pond with an island that had once had a monkey house (this is a real thing!) wherein several monkeys lived. Then a storm came, and all the monkeys left save one. Then the monkey house fell down, and the last monkey left. Hmph. Remaining in the pond were tiny and large fish (I was unsuccessful at eating the small fish) and turtles. One was a peculiar softshell turtle. The other was, as Jim (or Jheem, le manageur) informed us, was "just, like, a water turtle, you know?" We tried to feed them bread, but they were almost too stupid.

Richard himself is fascinating. His Asperger's idiosyncrasies weren't at all irritating, especially since he's such a (compulsively) rational guy and was totally cool talking about it. Waay cooler was his profound geekiness. He's been involved in IC design and FS/OS since before the beginning. The copious art on his walls was about half nudes and half NASA photographs of the Earth from space, the Shuttle on Earth, space from Hubble, etc. His computer hardware was not at all bleeding edge (his ThinkPad must be five years old), but his software was, and his cables were meticulously hidden. He related to us the time RMS (yes, Richard Motherfucking Stallman) telephoned him because his computer wouldn't boot! Richard's first question, he admitted, was "Well, what OS are you using?" RMS was hardly amused. Needless to say, we hit it off like a house afire. I caught him in the obvious fallacy of stating a salt-water pool's density as exactly 1g/cm³, and we had a chuckle. While we were lounging poolside, he said to me, "Hey, I just got some e-mail from someone whose name you might recognise" and showed me his inbox on his BlackBerry. It was Linus Torvalds!

I am so totally a fan. Maybe in a couple years his company'll be needing some SQL-proficient physics grad students to crunch a few numbers?

And in case you were worried, it was a problem with GRUB not recognising the new hard drive the OS was on. They physically removed the drive, flipped it over (because for some reason it would fit in two different ways), stuck it back in and it worked fine. Happy ending!

P.S. I am now so deeply tanned I can at last reasonably invite people to kiss my black ass.

"Boy Pierces Brain with Antler, but is Fine."

2007-12-03T17:41:00.000-08:00

Wow. This stupid headline from msnbc.com has kept me laughing since I first saw it on Friday.

I fly out at some obscene time Thursday morning to hang out with Richard Kenner in Ft. Lauderdale for a few days. Richard is a middle-aged, nudist, Jewish computer wizard from Queens who I met through a friend of a friend. I don't know a lot about him, other than that his software used in airport control towers made him a millionaire, he works on the GNU compiler collection, and he is a major authority on VLSI. He works at NYU and eats lots of cheese sandwiches. Obviously, now that I've done some research, we will have loads to talk about--I mean, I love sandwiches too! If not, since it will be only him, me, and Arynn for six days, we will have a very quiet and awkward trip.

What am I saying? There won't be a dull moment.

I plotted out my course schedule for the next two years. Taking 15 or 16 credits most quarters, I'll be on track to transfer in Fall 2010 (god, that sounds like a long way off), majoring in physics and minoring in something that encompasses database development and computer modeling. Yeah, it sounds real sexy, I know. But CERN's Large Hadron Collider will be producing something like a grillion times the data hosted on the entire World Wide Web every day, and someone's got to make some sense of it. Otherwise they're just bashing little things together for the hell of it. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics says:

Although physics research may require extensive experimentation in laboratories, research physicists still spend time in offices planning, recording, analyzing, and reporting on research.

When I'm not doing the grunt work of analysing the data to see what new particles fall out of the wash, I'll be designing the experiments that could demonstrate or disprove supersymmerty. I'll have front-row tickets to the Big Bang (much harder to get than reservations at Milliway's, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe). My office will be the first set abuzz when string theory finally does something useful--or when it's torn to shreds.

This will make me an experimental physicist, not a theorist. So I won't be able to claim Drs. Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Richard Feynman, or Bertie Oneglass as my professional kindred. Experimental physics doesn't seem to produce celebrity quite the same way. Soo...I guess if I still feel the need for hot groupie action, I may need to moonlight as a rockstar after all.

Cleanliness is next to CH3-(CH2)n - COONa, and I'm next to The Crocodile

2007-11-28T17:56:00.000-08:00

While I hate advertising, I like well-written advertising copy. Whilst shopping for a Periodic Table shower curtain (277,000 hits with Google), I encountered the following:

"This might not remind you what Laureth is (it's a contraction for lauryl-ether, made from the sulfation of lauryl alcohol, but you knew that), but it's hard to deny the Periodic Table Shower Curtain's usefulness." (Italics are mine.)

Let's not pretend. One does not purchase a Periodic Table shower curtain because it is useful. That's what your business-card sized Periodic Table is for. And perfectly functional plain curtains can be had for a fraction of the price of the covetable Periodic Table shower curtain.

Why, then, you might ask, would I be shopping for a Periodic Table shower curtain? Why, for my new apartment, of course. There's a nifty little studio in Belltown, miraculously in my price range, that I'm hoping to move into around the end of the month. It's right on 1st Ave, comfortably bikeable to/from the Hill and the U-District. Maybe I'll get it settled in time to have another New Year's Eve/Housewarming party.

By the way, CH₃-(CH₂)n - COONa is soap. But you knew that too. r dr r.

Charmed, I'm Sure.

2007-11-27T19:10:00.000-08:00

I'm starting this blog at the suggestion of a friend, who flattered me by saying other people would want to read my observations. He also said it would save him having to search through his e-mail, so clearly it was not an entirely altruistic suggestion. I, on the other hand, recently lost my phone and realised how the social networking sites the kids keep talking about could have made recovering my contacts easier. If I'd joined the rest of the world in sucking on Rupert Murdoch's saggy teats, I could have simply "MySpaced" everyone I know to get their number back. Or I could have skipped that entirely, since I never called most of the hundred-odd people in my contacts list, but might have been able to work up the motivation to follow a link to their MySpace page. But I hate MySpace. I especially hate the usage of "MySpace" as a verb.

Instead, this blog is part of the Google "cloud," mankind's first corporate-sponsored attempt to store all the information in the universe in a computer smaller than and contained within the universe. Google was accepted as a verb more quickly than you can say "Fuck you, Jeeves, and the Aston-Martin you rode in on." But instead of finding this usage irritating, I find it endearing. As Blaise Pascal said, "There's no accounting for taste." ("La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.")
The discovery of this project with the most damning consequences to number theory is that despite thought experiments about the nature of infinty involving monkeys, typewriters, and the works of William Shakespeare, nothing even approaching English, let alone classic English literature, has yet been produced by the vast number of monkeys posting on /b/.

So here is my blog, which is designed to save me effort while allowing me to expound the little and bigger points that tickle me. Like how I'm totally getting off on all the news that compounds the devaluation of the dollar and the imminent recession that newspapers are finding it harder not to acknowledge. (Mr. Bernanke: Instead of lowering interest rates more, why not try printing more money and giving it away free to stimulate domestic spending? Or edge out the Euro by buying them all and selling them back to the world at a much lower price, thereby devaluing them? Maybe because those are also stupid ideas? Crikey.) Or the sad lady I saw at a Safeway in Bremerton on Thanksgiving, wearing a Navy sweatshirt cut into a halter top, making her preteen kid hold her rack of PBR Light while she strapped her infant into the cart. In a very real way, she is the ultimate inspiration for this blog.

Incidentally, it may entertain you.