biomotion is neato. Here's a page of demos for the Troje biomotion lab.

Especially recommended are the tool (Flash required) and the face animation.

Allright. It came up at work today, and I'm totally out of touch. How does one get the best deals on airfare these days? Are things like travelocity.com and expedia.com still the best deals? Is it better to book way in advance or at the last minute?

For examples, let's use San Francisco (or thereabouts) to Providence Rhode Island (or thereabouts). My sister lives in RI and i'd like to go visit her one of these days. If rhode island is too hard, use Detroit or Chicago.

So now that i'm using firefox at work, I'm getting into the whole tabbed browser thing. But i'm thinking, HTML has built-in attributes to open a page in a new window. Does it have built-in attributes to open a page in a new tab? I guess that's a display issue and has no place in HTML anyway, but since we've got new windows, i think we should get new tabs too.

Ok, so I haven't read the whole article yet, and I don't have a link to the article, so you'll have to bear with me. There's an article in New Scientist that seems to answer a question i've always had: to what extent is personal experience universal? That is to say, if you see something green, and I see something green, we can agree it's green, but are we both experiencing the same color sensation? We're both seeing light with a 420nm wavelength, but do we experience it similarly? I don't even mean does it stir up the same memories, I mean, if I were to suddenly start experienceing the world as someone else does, would I feel like I was having some sort of acid-induced visual hallucination?

Allright, I've never been able to pose the question very well, and I sure didn't do a good job here. I guess there's something about the privacy of subjective experience that is just really difficult to penetrate. Anyway, it looks like the answer is no. There is no universal mode of perception even on the lowest levels. Scientists are finding this out through various modes of research, including genetics and neuroscience.

If I wasn't so lazy i'd get you links to abstracts of the relevant journal articles and even a link to the article in the magazine. Maybe once i've actually finished reading the article.

Saw this on BaddyOneShoe's blog, thought i'd do it too:

create your own visited country map

It's funny. Untill i made this map I thought i was pretty well-traveled. but damn! I've never been to Africa, S. America, or most of Asia. That makes up for a pretty huge part of the world.

Had an interesting night tonight. Got a PS2, which is awesome. Some dumbass almost killed me on the freeway driving home. Not so awesome. Speaking of dumbasses driving, here are some DUI statistics for the morbid (sorry it's a PDF).

So i'd like suggestions for awesome PS2 games. Ideally having some sort of 2 player cooperative mode. And I don't usually like racing games.

Ugh. I just watched the Cal rugby team lose to the UBC Thunderbirds. Major bummer. The score was 18-14. The game was exciting, but as is typical with the Bears' first meeting with UBC, they weren't used to playing a team that's just about as good as them.

The match is part of the 'world cup series', which is about as good a name for it as the world series is for baseball. Notwithstanding, Cal and UBC are pretty much the two best teams in N. America. Although looking at UBC's game history, some team called Seattle handed them a thrashing at 0-55.

Because they only lost by 4 points, the bears have a good chance to win the cup if they can beat UBC in the second meeting. The cup goes to whichever of the two has the highest total score after the two games.

Props to LabRat for making the drive up for the game. The next homegame is March 13th against Sacramento State. All y'all are welcome to come to my place for beers before/after.

I just lived through a computer nerd's nightmare. Two people that needed to put their face close to the screen to read anything, both constantly touching the monitor, leaving greasy fingerprints, both trying to instruct me in two different ways to accomplish something I already know how to do, both capable of firing me. It was gross.

the end.

It's a travesty. Try it on second order.

For the lovers of cute, fuzzy animals out there:

So i'm here house-sitting for some people in this really nice house. They've got an ancient cat. Her name is Samantha, and she's quite endearing. I had always considered myself a dog person until two things happened. One was meeting Samantha, who showed me cats aren't all standoffish and snotty. The other was when my sister told me: "You know, even though Dad and i are both really alergic to cats, I don't think that's the real reason we didn't have a cat. I think that all of [our family] are way too much like cats for us to want another cat around."

I had always considered myself a dog person. But really i think i'm a cat person that happens to prefer the company of dogs.

Ah ha! I now have dsl. (again). But this time it is in Berkeley. To celebrate, I put some of my pics on the web. Ok, so some of them aren't mine, but most of them are obscure enough that nobody's going to sue me over it.

You can check out all of them at my geocities page. Here's a taste of what's there:

Not much posting going on lateley, so here's the skinny:

I got a new job in berkeley (see previous posts). The job isn't as bad as my post from friday, i was just stressed out. I'm all moved into my apartment, thanks to the support of Lena, my Mom and Dad, and especially JJ. JJ helped me fill up my SUV and we loaded up his SUV and we made a Caravan of Gass-Guzzling Earth-Hating Asswhuppin. JJ even flipped somebody off. In your face, hippies!

My apartment is slowly becoming my home, it's kind of cold and damp. I'm not sure what to do about that. I think i'll make some stew. That will at least warm me up. I live accross the street from a supermarket, so I don't have to do much planning for meals. It's nice.

Anyway, sorry for being incommunicado for so long, there's lots to say about my place and my job, but I don't have my DSL hooked up yet, so that will all have to wait.

PS I missed the Superbowl 'cause I was unpacking and stuff, and I don't have any TV reception in my apartment, so anybody with links to the best of the commercials, please post. thanks.