I have found that exaptation triumvirate is a google whack. yay for me!

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! (with associated good tidings to you and your kin)

'Cause I know you love that Chronic
les of Narnia.

It's almost time for Christmas in the Balroom 2005, or XB2k5. I'm in it. It will be fun. Linkage to more information.

It's bad enough going up against number 1. Going up against number 1 and a self-defeating qb, well, that bird's not going to fly. The last five minutes, though, made me wonder about Levy. He played with some authority, and he showed some promise. Of course that fumble (and that almost fumble) didn't look good, but maybe we'll see him at the Big Game.

Since approximately half of the readership here is in to David Lynch, I thought you might be interested. David Lynch is coming to Berkeley on Sunday to talk about consciousness and meditation, or some such hippy nonsense. Anyway, he'll be doing an EEG demonstration to show the brainwaves of someone doing transcendental meditation. I'm into EEG as well as hippy nonsense, so I may end up going.

Here's a link with the details.

Believe your noodly master, hon

Being in power means there's always someone to take the fall.

The article mentions, though, that Cheney is still "under investigation and in legal jeopardy." We'll see where that goes in, what, another two years?

And what a game it was! Cal 42, WSU 38. It was a cliffhanger to the very end. Our defense really stepped up in the fourth quarter, and the offense did it's job. It's true: the fourth quarter's ours.

They did show off some of our weaknesses. WSU found a mismatch in our pass coverage, and they made scoring on us look easy in the third quarter. Their running game was more successful than I would have liked.

From where I was sitting, it looked like the officials made some downright terrible calls. What did it look like from TV land? Despite this, our team pulled out some clutch performances, and we're looking more like a team that's turning around.

And of course, Go Bears!

I just scored two free tickets to the Cal vs WSU game tomorrow. They're in the donor's section right next to the student section. Goooo Bears!

R.I.P Yvonne De Ridder Files 1908(?) to 2005. *

I wanted to believe we really were a great team this season, but I couldn't help but feel that we were a pretty good team getting lucky. I still have hope, but really I'm just hoping for more good luck. I don't see Ayoob making much progress, and we're just being worn down by injury after injury.

Well, at least we can still enjoy demolishing Stanford when the time comes, and anything can hapen in Cal Football.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, here is the answer to what exactly constitutes civilization.
Now that I'm sure you're wondering, I'm posting this so anyone hearing me say "x is civilization" can understand the depth of my dedication to "x"

Riddle me this.
I am trying to come up with a riddle based on the following notion: The better an arbitrator is, the less arbitrary his decisions are. Any help?

Here's my quote for the ages: Functionally organized visual cortex is a concept of post-Ford construction, and it is unlikely to arise in a biological system.

I don't have any evidence for my claim. The only thing I can indicate (and this sort of thing never proves anything) is a lack of evidence for a functionally organized visual cortex.

So this morning I stop by a campus cafe and grab an Odwalla drink. The sign says Odwalla Juice: $2.69. I grab one and head to the checkout. The lady says, "$3.49" and I say, "oh! I thought it was $2.69." She indicates the sign below the one I saw indicating Odwalla Smoothies are, in fact, $3.49. She looks at me and says,

"That's not juice. That's nutrition, baby!"

I've spent a lot of time in the magnet. Fortunately, none of these things have happened to me. [NY Times, reg required]

Photos upcoming. I am not dead. That is all.

Here's the deal: I'm supposed to be in Costa Rica, but I'm in Berkeley instead. Our flight out of oakland to phoenix was delayed to the point that, if we took the flight, we would miss our flight out of phoenix to costa rica. The nice lady at America West's ticketing counter booked us on a Taca airline flight out of San Francisco to Costa Rica. It was a red-eye.

So they put us on a shuttle to SFO, and we got there at around 3:00. The Taca desk doesn't open untill about 9:00 pm. We spent the afternoon in the airport reading Harry Potter.

Once the Taca desk opened, the agent told us there was a problem. The America West agent had booked us on the 1:00 AM for *Saturday* morning. I don't know how she managed to get a confirmation number on a flight that had left 11 hours previous.

Upon hearing this, we troop over to the America West desk (in a whole different terminal) just to find it completely desserted.

At this point it's about 9:30 and Nikki starts trying to get a hold of someone at America West on the phone. After telling the above story no fewer than three times--and it's a confusing story, so it takes a while to tell--the AW people tell us to go home and try again tomorrow.

So 16 hours later, here we are, back in Berkeley, booked on the exact same flights for Sunday.

PS The moral of the story is: don't fly america west.

I'm leaving for Costa Rica tomorrow morning. I'm very excited. The forecast looks a little dreary, but that's what I get for going to the tropics in the rainy season. I'll be sure to post some pictures when I get back. Don't go crazy while I'm gone!

So my boss had me helping him with a presentation he was working on. He wanted to use a frame from a Pogo cartoon (by Walt Kelly, for those who care) in one of his slides. He has some trouble interfacing with the intertron, so he asked me to help him find it. Apparently he had found what he was looking for by using google image search with the term pogo. I did exactly that, and to my horror, the first hit was [nsfw]this picture . That's right. My boss had essentially forced me to look at boobies while at work. I guess my job isn't too bad after all.

An article (by a findlaw writer) on CNN about the legal precedent that may apply to the Karl Rove identity leak case.

If manhattan can do it, so can you!

Ok, ok. I know. You're sick of me posting stuff from Penny Arcade. Well, I simply had to share with you a quote from today's newspost. For the most part, said post is similar to (albeit self-consciously) the impotent whining of a kid who can't play with his toy. The last bit, however, manages to turn into an acute sort of distopian consumerist manifesto:

"We purport to be angry, but it is largely an ethereal anger, suitable for forums on the Intertron. There is no connection between my willingness to purchase shoddy products and the continued production of said products. At any rate, there is no connection that I am able to perceive."

If you haven't heard of Project Gutenberg, I sugest you check it out. It's a huge resource of both free and public domain books, digitized for your electronic consumption. It's also a great resource for when you want to know how many times Shakespeare uses the word 'tup' in Othello, for instance. Just search over the whole text.

Anyway, it seems that in order to speed the digitizing of these books, someone scans all the pages and uploads them. The pages are then OCRed, but they still need to be checked. This is where the Distributed Proofreading system comes in. You go and get a page and check it for errors. Once all the pages are checked, it becomes an official e-book. Hooray!

I'm working on an online GRE prep course. It gives a question, then provides feedback. I got a tough one right, and here's what it said to me: "Wow! The light of a thousand suns is no brighter than you." Kind of effusive, if you ask me. Anyway, the prep is free to UC Berkeley people (and maybe others). Check it out.

My life is full of boxes. Some of the boxes contain memories. Mostly, they contain old phone bills and other junk.

How fast can you clickred? My best time in two tries is 74 seconds. It is supposed to be a demonstration that twitch gamers are better at tracking multiple objects than non-gamers.

I don't remember if I ever posted this, so here you go: Penny Arcade remixed by japanese school children.

You're in Cuba and you want to get to the US. How would you do it? These folks took a taxi cab.

Pretty Pictures make me happy.

Today's Penny Arcade post spoke to me in a way things on the Itarwebs rarely do. The sentence about his refrigerator magnets? Brilliant. The entire post drips with expression. Well, the first sentence in the last paragraph drips with ichor from the typographic morass from which it was dredged. Some random punctuation got stuck in there on the way up. Overall, though, I feel that grammar euphoria is an oft-overlooked topic and deserves more such rhapsodies.

Also, my dream last night was a survival-horror combination of World of Warcraft meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thrilling.

Things that suck:

• My cold-that-won't-go-away is back with a vengeance.
• My car with only 40k miles on the odometer failed its smog check this morning.
• The hard-drive on my computer at work died and I'm still trying to get the data back.
• On top of my general laziness, my cold plus an unusually busy schedule mean my apartment is an absolute sty. gross.

Things that rock:

• I'm learning how to use Linux as a desktop. Yay Knoppix!
• I'm going to Costa Rica in July.
• There's a long weekend coming up.
• WoW is a lot of fun.

My lack of updates has been fuelled by the failure of my commenting system and my bussiness with the Berkeley Opera. Here's a review of our opening night performance. The reviewer is a UC Berkeley alum, and as such was over-kind to the UC Alumni Choir (of which I am a member).

Instead of sets and such, Berkeley Opera hired some artist to put together some video that was projected on screens on the stage. The reviewer expressed pretty well how I felt about the results:

"One set of [projected] images was hackneyed. Macbeth becomes a tyrant and so we saw the familiar faces of twentieth century tyrants, including – surprise – Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. Does the audience need this kind of prompting? Leave the simplistic parallels and polemics to Bill O’Reilly and radio talk shows."

How to write a lab notebook
Disclaimer: This link is not intended to be entertaining or even interesting to anyone not looking to learn the basics of keeping a lab notebook.

I should have read about quick-release bicycle wheels.

Be advised that blind people can still hear.

What do you call it? I call it "the city". It seems the hippest kids call it "tha 'Sco". The (only very slightly) less hip call it "Frisco". Some feel this isn't the right thing to do. And among those, at least one owns a laundromat.

Wired has a great article about some high-school kids in Arizona who won an undewater engineering contest.

One difficulty they ran into was a leak in their electronics component housing. It was a small leak, so rather than try to fix it, they went for absorption. What absorbs the best? Tampons!

When Luis lowered Stinky into the water for their run, Lorenzo prayed to the Virgin Mary. He prayed that the tampons would work but then wondered if the Virgin got her period and whether it was appropriate for him to be praying to her about tampons. He tried to think of a different saint to pray to but couldn't come up with an appropriate one. The whir of Stinky's propellers brought him back to the task at hand, extracting a water sample from a submerged container.

Yeah, so the reporter probably made the part about praying up, but the tampons were real!

Reefer Madness?

New Scientist has a bit of an article about various studies of the long-term effects of smoking cannabis at a young age. From the article: "those who had smoked cannabis three times or more before the age of 15 were much more likely to suffer symptoms of schizophrenia by the time they were 26 - they had a 10 per cent chance compared with 3 per cent for the general population".

So if any of you are under 15 and don't fancy more than tripling your chances for schizophrenia, stay off the dope! Of course, schizophrenia isn't the only problem for which cannabis use seems to be a risk factor. If you are 'at risk' of psychosis (whatever that means) and you use cannabis, your risk increases dramatically. One study found that "susceptible individuals who avoided cannabis had a 25 per cent chance of developing psychosis. Susceptible individuals who smoked it had a 50 per cent risk". So crazies, stay off the reefer!

Weather Underground

Which method would you choose?

So I didn't realize there was more than one Darkstalkers game, but I was in EB Games the other day, and noticed pre-orders for a new Darkstalkers for the PSP. I checked out the trailer, and one of the playable characters seems to be little red riding hood. Don't worry, your favorite characters will still be on hand. Oh, and it seems little red is packing some heat.

So, I don't know if any of you remember, but I posted some images of my head from an Anatomical MRI. Well, I've been working with this software called FreeSurfer to convert the slicewise images of my brain into a 3d render of my brain. The exciting (and difficult) part of this render is that it knows the difference between white matter (axons and such) and gray matter (cell bodies that do the real 'thinking'). I present you with a couple of views of my brain. (click for the larger version on a yafro page)

Bono: Rock Star? Yes. Head of the world bank?

Ack! I haven't been keeping up with rugby. A quick look at their main page shows everything is going well at 11-0, including a clean sweep of the Texas schools. But here's the big news:
Cal vs Stanford at Cal, Saturday 1:00 pm. I may have another obligation, but if things go according to plan, I'll be there, and I hope you will too.

If you don't know The Perry Bible Fellowship you might want to check it out. Funny. Sick. Maybe not something to peruse at work. I expect at least one of you (I won't say who) probably has at least seen this stuff before.

A bit about what the hell I do at my job:

I'm in charge of a group of 4 undergraduate students (we'll call them my minions) and we're working on a research project. We had our first meeting yesterday, and it went very well. Our project has to do with glare and a glare sensitivity test. As you may surmise from reading that page, there are no well-accepted tests for glare sensitivity in the clinical setting. We think we are on the way to getting something that would work for a clinic.

So what? Of course, that's the question. Well, one group of people who would really like to see an effective glare test are prospective LASIK patients. Some LASIK patients have complained of glare after having the surgery. This test would answer questions like "what are the chances I'd have glare problems?" and "how bad might it be?" I would certainly want to know the answers to those questions before doing LASIK.

So, my new graphics card is working nicely. I've noticed that desktop performance (window scrolling etc) isn't quite as good, but 3D performance is just swell. I haven't had a chance to really see what it can do, but preliminary results are good.

Now that i've got a machine that can handle newer games, do I go for Battlefield Vietnam or Farcry?

So, I took the plunge and got the XFX GeForce 6600gt AGP for about 225 incl. tax. There's a 25 buck rebate, but I almost always fail to get rebates, so we'll see. You can check out a comparative review of a few 6600gt cards from techreport.com for more info about my card. I'll undoubtably be putting rants or raves about it once I get the thing up and running.

If you're interested, I bought the card from ZipZoomFly.com and they've been alright so far. They had the best price and offered free 2-day fedex.

Let's say I'm willing to spend around $200 on games/electronics for the next, say 4 to 6 months. What should I do?

1. Replace my failing graphics card with a new one (~$100 - $160)
2. Buy a (pre-played) X-Box + controller + Halo and Halo2 (~$200)
3. Buy a (pre-played) Gamecube + controller + memory stick + Rogue Squadron (I and II) (~$150)
4. Buy some PS2 games

Going into this I was just planning on getting the graphics card, but then I saw the prices and began to think about what else I could do with that kind of money. Incidentally, the prices on the cards I was looking at last time I brought this up (around October maybe?) have not gone down much at all. The difference is that now my graphics card is dying, so it's a slightly more pressing issue. Anything using DirectX has horrible artifacting, making most of my 3d games kind of un-playable. Advice?

If anyone's interested, here's the perl script I wrote to check through a .pwf file and print the names of any users who are also using their username as a password. It's not documented, but I guess that'll be a feature of version 2.0.

while(<STDIN>){
        chop;
        next unless /^(.+):(.+)/;
        my $name = $1; 
        my $pwd = $2;
        my $salt = substr($pwd, 0, 2);

        if (crypt($name, $salt) eq $pwd) {
                print "$name\n";
        }
}

This iterates through whatever's coming in on stdin (so call this like perl foo.pl < bar.pwf) one line at a time. It chops the newline char off the end then skips the line unless it matches the pattern of one or more characters then a colon then one or more other characters. It then checks if the username encrypts to the encrypted password. If it does, the name gets printed to stdout. ta da!

Because penny arcade is down, here's the penny arcade remix project!

Argh, there's a browser problem out there. It affects every browser except Internet Explorer (and Lynx, as it turns out). To check it out, go over to schmoo and click the links. If the address bar says paypal.com but you're obviously not at paypal, I'd recommend not clicking on links to get you anyplace important until this is resolved. Really, you should type in by hand or use a bookmark to get anywhere important anyway. By important I mean anything someone would want to fool you about, such as money.

Of course, relatively speaking, I'd say you're still better off not using IE unless you're willing to wait around for Microsoft to tell you about flaws with their product.

Ok you geeks, I hate to admit it, but, much to my chagrin, I've discovered that Perl is fun. I just used it to parse a file (much like a .htaccess file) containing "username:encrypted_password" and test to see if the username was the same as the (unencrypted) password. (and no, i'm not breaking into anything, i'm supposed to be the admin for the system in question)

What astonishes me is how easy it was. It didn't take much work at all, and as I learn more about perl, I see how I could have done it even easier with built-in shortcuts and regexps.

The reason I'm astonished is because I used to hold a strong prejudice against perl. For those wondering why level-headed me would be so prejudicial, here's a bit of sample code I randomly grabbed from here
$drw =~ m/.*exception occurred:.*?pid=(\d+).*?\s+\1\s(.*?)\n/s;
Yeah. That's not real pretty. Perl jockeys seem to love code like that, and, quite frankly, it scares me. (and no, I still am not quite sure what that line is doing). Anyway, who knows? Maybe I'll be writing stuff like that in a few weeks. I kind of hope not.

Looking for some circumfloribus words? There's a great list at the bottom of this page of definitions for the word nonce.

Google Whack!

So I was so excited I had found a google whack that I didn't notice the one and only link has something to do with cumm factories. Please, let's just ignore that detail and rejoice in the whack.

Ok, so here's a rugby update. The Humboldt State 'Lumberjacks' (and they're OK!) made a good showing of themselves, putting in for one solid try near the end of the match. Yes, we did defeat them 43-7, but when you're playing the Bears, that 7 actually means a lot. Furthermore, they held us to under fifty. This is also a pretty solid accomplishment against the Bears.

Here's what head coach Jack Clark had to say: "It's to convenient to use the `it's the first game excuse.' The fact is we were not very dynamic." I guess that's the amazing thing about our program: a mere victory is not good enough.

So the next match is against Saint Mary's Staurday at 1:00 on Witter field. Come one, come all! Last match they were charging $8 for people not carrying Cal IDs. So alumni, dig out that old student ID. I'm not sure if the next match will be the same price; cost of entrance usually varies a lot from match to match.

For my next trick, you get a choice: do you want to hear about my experience with the Cal Alumni Choir, or do you want to hear my thoughts on Bush's inagural address?

I saw something remarkable on the way to work this morning. I saw a man standing in the park with a long leather strap dangling from his wrist. Any guesses? My guess was jesses. And I was right*! At his feet was a small falcon devouring some hapless prey. So it seems the noble art of falconry is alive and well in Berkeley.

* Almost. It turns out a jess is a strap on the falcon's leg to which a leash can be attached.

RUGBY!!!!

Alright, consider yourselves warned: Cal's season opener vs Humboldt State (usually a pretty good team) is Saturday the 15th at 1:00 pm. Everyone's welcome to beers/coffee/pizza/whatever at my place in the hour or so prior. Also, it's easy to park in my neighborhood, and rugby parking can be a hassle, so we should carpool.

I'm very excited about this season's schedule. Of special note are 6 home games to start the season including a Thursday night game against the UCSC Slugs, a home game against Stanfurd and we're hosting a round of 16 AND the championship round of four is at Stanford again this year.

So, here's to another glorious season of rucking, tackling and mauling by the mighty bears!