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!

Holiday fun at my parents' house! Here's a preview:

My mom took a course in folk-art cooking, and one of the things she learned about was marzapan sculpting. She brought us a hunk of marzapan and this cool colored dye/dust stuff, and we made little mini-things. Things made include: a carrot, an apple, a fish, baby jesus, and piggies! (I made the piggies. there was some drama there, 'cause my piggie's head fell off at one point, and his snout and ears crumbled. This made me very sad. I needed to take a time-out.)

Anyway, happy holidays from my home to yours, and I hope you all get what you wanted for Christmas.

Here's a fun article for you couch psychologists out there. It's a study on incompetence, and how/why people who are incompetent (at something) are generally oblivious to their incompetence, and grossly overestimate their skills or knowledge in specific fields.

If you're not interested in reading, here's a figure from the article. The researchers asked the subjects how good they were at logic (relative to the students in their class), and then gave them a quick logic test. The subjects were asked to assess their performance after taking their test. The figure shows percieved competence, percieved test score, and actual test score. All numbers are in terms of percentile.

Hey, so I've been noticing these pyramid type thingies for getting a free iPod. Apparently there are some scammy ones and some real ones. Have any of you tried to get a free iPod? Any success? If I researched the right scheme to try, would any of you be willing to put in a few minutes to help me get it?

It seems like the way it works is you create an account and then go sign up for some deal. Most of them are something like 'sign up for our service for a year at a discount' but some are 'try our service free for a month, and if you like it, take no action and we'll bill you'. If you do the free trial then cancel (assuming you don't want the service), then it costs you nothing. Anyone?

Christmas Shopping

The Christmas Shopper:
Alone in a sea of peers,
A single snowflake

on Winter in Berkeley:

The soggy sky sobs
winedark wetness and gray gloom:
The longest of nights.

And in case lofty poetry isn't your thing, here's something funny.

For those running FireFox (browser) and Thunderbird (email) but don't keep up with the latest nerd news, FireFox 1.0 has been out for about a month, and Thunderbird 1.0 just came out. Go grab 'em if you want the latest and greatest! Both downloads are under 6 MB if you're grabbing the executables, so it's quick and easy.

For those still running Internet Explorer and Outlook, get with the program!

Remember your loved ones, bling-bling style.

My Dad is wanting to build a computer to replace his DVD player, CD player and VHS collection. He's asked for my help, and right now I'm looking at two options. One is to go for Windows Media Center Edition, and the other is to go for Debian Linux + MythTV.

What I'm thinking so far is that the Windows solution is slick and integrated, but it would be expensive (both for the software and hardware). My dad is a frugal guy, so I'm not sure I could sell it. The linux solution is free (software) and has flexible hardware requirements. Both are feature-rich. One of many benefits to going for the linux based solution (that I just thought of) is that when I get the inevitable support requests, I can just ssh into the linux box and fix it myself.

Have any of you tried anything similar? Have any suggestions? Leave a comment!

Hey Everyone, happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for all my friends, and I hope you are all well and such.

On an unrelated topic, I am missing some cds. I have the jewel cases, but not the disks! Did any of you borrow cds from me? I didn't think so. Any psychics in the audience? Let me know where they are!

Big Game Day! Gooo Bears!
So radio coverage of the game is available online through KGO 810 for you distant bears.

Also, the Cal vs. Stanford rivalry has become even more marketable, as is evidenced by the Lexus Gauntlet competition. They keep track of (almost) all the meetings between the two schools and assign points for each competition, and at the end the winner gets the prize. Now, it's kind of fishy that they don't display how many points a particular contest is worth untill the game is over; it seems like they could manipulate it to keep the contest close. On the other hand, it looks like major events are 5 points and minor events are 2.5.

The outrageous part is they don't seem to be including rugby in the contest! Boooooooooo. Maybe they're afraid Stanfurd Rugby will chicken out again.

So one of my favorite web comics, Penny Arcade is having this fundraiser dinner for their charity, Child's Play. It also happens to benefit Oakland Children's Hospital. I'd like to go, but the dinner's in Washington. Any other swanky events I can attend?

Oh, and ps. Here's some links to some of my favorite PA strips: Twisp and Catsby, An older one about Neverwinter Nights, My Brain is Coming Out!, Perfect Eternal Jackass, and Meat is murder. Ok, so many of these won't make a lot of sense unless you know something about the relevant video game. The strip itself has improved vastly in terms of the quality of the drawing in the last few months. I think the cartoonist just had a baby (well his wife had the baby). Could it be related?

Aaaargh! Steam or Brick and Mortar? I want the bloody disk, but I also want the 'silver' package. Well, in any event, don't anybody plan on hearing from me for a while.

Last weekend I played golf with my Uncle again. We played nine holes at Blackberry Farm in Cupertino. I got my typical score of about 2x par. And. I broke one of my uncle's golf clubs. His five-iron, to be precise. He wasn't too upset, but I feel pretty bad about it.

Here's how it happened: I messed up my tee shot and my ball landed about 3 feet from the trunk of this little tree. It was laying such that if I stood with my back to the trunk I could hit the ball. My backswing didn't hit the trunk, so I figured I was good to go. I hit the ball ok, but on the follow-through of my swing the shaft of the club hit the tree trunk. It broke right in half.

So I'm thinking I'll need to find a gift certificate to some golf shop or something. Who does golf club repairs?

AdSense is up. What do you think of the colors? I can choose pretty much any color-scheme, but I thought this one fit in pretty well. I need to figure out how to get it to float right, but that will just take some fiddling. Other ideas for placement? Also, I have the option to put a google search bar on the page. Should I do that? Maybe at the bottom? Chime in if you have an opinion.

Are Bush's Cronies Jumping Ship? If you read the whole article, it mentions several top members of Bush's cabinet leaving, including Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell, although some are presented as rumors more than anything else. I wonder how much airline tickets out of DC cost these days?

Let the theorizing begin on what's happening in the Bush camp!

I'm considering participating in Google's 'AdSense' program. Here's how it works: they display ads (if they can find any that are relevant to my blog) and I get some credit every time an ad gets a click. If (and that's probably a big if) I earn over $100 in credits, they send me a check.

I'm thinking that with my current readership I'll be getting $100 sometime in January (2012), so I'm not exactly slavering at the financial opportunities. However, it might be fun to see what AdSense thinks is relevant to my blog. What do y'all think? I think JJ is pretty anti-advertising, but maybe he'll make an exception.

Also, it might motivate me to post more often. That would also be fun.

Yeah, that was pretty much my gut reaction. But as per my post from yesterday, I believe US Citizens aren't dumb. I just disagree with a lot of them based on different world-views and information access.
That headline did make me chuckle in a dark, brooding sort of way, though.

If the election left a bitter taste in your mouth, this study might make you feel better. It made me feel worse.

The results of the presidential election have left me feeling alienated from the rest of the country. How did so many of my fellow citizens, whom I regard as generally reasonable and intelligent people, come to such an overwhelmingly different conclusion than I did? I have to assume we were looking at a whole different set of data, really. I guess that's a result of living in this bubble of Democrats. As someone living in a non-swing state, I haven't been inundated with propaganda for the past several months (or at least I'm seeing a whole different set of propaganda). Maybe if I had seen all the ad campaigns then I might not have been convinced, but at least I might come closer to understanding how anyone could support Bush.

Or maybe I can just take comfort from the study that said more than half of Bush-supporters are hopelessly misinformed and get on with my life.

One bit of comfort I found in all this is the turnout for the election. At least people are participating, and that's the first step.

It's my birthday! Also, remember to vote! Take back the republic! Yaaaa!

How exciting to have a blood moon so close to Halloween! This bodes well for the spooks and spirits this Sunday.

Whoever created this cube solver deserves some sort of trans-nerding award for combining three of the coolest geek fields ever: Lego, Rubiks Cube, and Robot Vision.

Last night I had a dream that inspired me to this Haiku. It's entitled:
"For Quelbo"

The gentle giant,
with lumbering grace and poise:
Hippopotamus.

An alternative second line, "king of subaqueous grace:", came to mind, but the word 'subaqueous' seems a little hamhanded.

The new Google Desktop Search application is now available for beta use.

I am very impressed so far. I searched for a word I knew would appear in several of my documents and in 0.01 sec it came up with 36 results. We're talking inside .txt, .doc, and .pdf files, too. That search takes the windows 2000 file searcher (yeah, that cute little puppy) at least ten minutes. To be fair, I should point out that the app hasn't yet finished indexing my hard drive (although in about 5 minutes it got through nearly 1000 files). I'm going to reserve judgement untill I've used it for a while, but so far it's looking pretty good.

So I finally got around to setting up an email address for this blog. You can mail me at benvis@gmail.com. I realize I'll get spam for posting here, but I'll deal. I'm also adding a link. Oh! And if anyone wants a gmail invite, I have a few available. If you know me it's free, but if you don't, you have to send me a story. Any story will do as long as I've never read it before.

I really kind of hope someone sends me a story!

Thanks to Allen for posting this movie of the Cal vs USC game from last season. Dr.J, you'll like the music they chose for the first half of play. Watching this thing just made my day. Anybody putting together a phatty game party for this weekend?

I'm listening to The Roots album "Phrenology". Here's a phrenological report on Charlotte Bronte!

In other news: today you could have gone to the Love Parade in SF.

Because I'm in Madison, home of Bucky Badger.

I'm considering going for a new template, but I'll have to do it when I have time to put all my links in. In other news, Cal destroys Airforce with a final score of 56 to 14. Gooooo Bears!

Oh, and I now have a Yafro page. Not much there, but I may start using it now that I have it. All you yafrodites add me as your friend. I don't know what it means to be a 'friend' in this context, but I like friends, so go for it.

Yup, that's my brain. Note the lumpy skull. I'm not sure what that weird rounded triangle-shaped thingy is, and that's a bit disconcerting. I'll have to hit the anatomy texts. I have 128 slices in each of the 3 major axes, so if there's some view of my brain you want to see, I'm taking requests!

Some of you may remember the trauma I experienced upon discovering that my brain produces insufficient brainwaves. Well, I have since learned that I give good fMRI signals. This means I have excellent blood flow in my brain. Hooray!

Today I learned about change blindness. I was particularly amazed by slow change blindness

In case you were wondering how google really works.

I was a subject for an EEG experiment this week, but my head produced insufficient results! One researcher claimed I have such a thick skull that I don't conduct brain potentials to the outside. However, I do seem to be a strong producer of Alpha Waves, which some associate with creativity and higher levels of consciousness. Others claim this indicates I just wasn't concentrating. While I prefer the former, I tend to believe the latter.

In other news, I'm thinking of making a trip out east sometime this fall. Anyone have any suggestions?

RoboSLAP!

Last night, I had a damn good margarita. At an otherwise quite uninspiring bar. Who would have thought that the UC Berkeley Faculty Club would have an awesome bartender?

I completed my first run. Right after work today I went out and got myself some running shoes. I bought some Adidas for about fifty bucks at footlocker.

Following the advice from the page I linked to yesterday, I took a short walk and stretch before running. I walked about .3 miles to the Ohlone Greenway [history] [pics], stretched, then ran around the greenway (totalling about a mile). At that point I was pretty tuckered out so I decided to slow down to a brisk walk. I walked another .3 miles, then resumed running around another chunk of the Ohlone Greenway (a part i'd never seen before) for 2/3 of a mile. Finished off with a walk home of about .3 miles.

For those that are wondering why i'm being so absurdly specific about the mileages, I was curious how far i'd gone, and I found a neato program called RouteRuler, an Open Source Java program that lets you load a map in one of a few image formats, define a scale, then click waypoints. It then adds up the mileage. I loaded in a Yahoo! map (as an aside, I discovered that through a mutual fund i bought, I own approximately one ten billionth of Yahoo!) and clicked up my route, and it told me how far i'd run. Pretty neat stuff.

Running?

So i'm thinking about taking up running. It seems like it would be a good and cheap way to get in shape (something i desperately need to do). Also, if I run, i'll be able to have more fun dancing, because I won't get so tired.

Some other benefits of running are that it's free, and it's something I already have basic experience with. Some drawbacks are that it's not necessarily a social activity, and it can be boring. A friend of mine belongs to a climbing gym. There is a climbing gym not too far from my home. Rock climbing is a lot of fun and is social, but in this case isn't at all free.

Of course, i'm happy to hear suggestions from my friends for other fun and inexpensive ways to get in shape. leave a comment if you have an idea!

I had a fun starwars moment today. Our lab went on a field trip to the Smith Kettlewell Research Institute to learn how to use some head modelling software. First we learned how to do a sphere. The program put a kind of weird skin on the sphere that made it dark gray and look like it had craters. "looks like the moon!" someone said. The next step was to do a more detailed model of the sphere (which was made of fairly large pixels). In the detailed model, the sphere had a rougher texture. "It looks like the Deathstar!" someone else said. The software guy then said, in a pretty good Obi-wan voice "That's no moon!"

You probably had to be there.

In other news, a pretty big security problem was found in the code used to render PNG images in Mozilla (including FireFox). I recommend upgrading to FireFox 0.9.3, if you haven't already.

The balloon drop that will live in infamy.

I'm a dork. I accidentally (really!) started playing this onine game. You build an army and use it to attack other people's armies. I can't really figure out if there's a reason to attack anyone except to steal their gold. Anyway, the more people that click this link, the bigger my army gets.

Here's where I explain how I accidentally started playing: When you click the link, you have to click the number button corrisponding to the number image (to help prevent bots from cheating, or something). That's all you have to do. After that, if you want to, you can create your own account and start your own army. I didn't read the page very carefully, so I just kept filling out fields and clicking 'next...' and ended up with my own army!

PS you can click one time every day, if you really want to increase my military might =)

Today my thoughts tend toward passive-aggressive behavior. I find it annoying, not just because of the aggressive part, but because the passive part makes it so difficult to address. People throw the term passive-aggressive around a lot, but I'm not sure I have a very good definition of it. I checked out the definition at Medline, and here's an excerpt:

Passive aggressive personality disorder is a chronic condition in which a person seems to acquiesce to the desires and needs of others, but actually passively resists them and becomes increasingly hostile and angry. ... A person with this disorder may appear to comply with another's wishes, and may even say that he wants to do what he has agreed to do, but the requested action is either performed too late to be helpful, performed in a way that is useless, or otherwise sabotaged to express anger about compliance that isn't related verbally.

An interesting tidbit from the medline article notes: "psychiatrists no longer recognize this condition as an official diagnosis; however, the symptoms are problematic to many people and may be helped by professional attention, so we include it here." As it turns out, there is a bit of history behind the use of the term, and its classification as a disorder or not. I read this in an article over at Straight Dope that gives a summary of the use of the term, and also offers some analysis:

The most telling complaint, in my opinion, was that merely being passive-aggressive isn't a disorder but a behavior--sometimes a perfectly rational behavior, which lets you dodge unpleasant chores while avoiding confrontation. It's only pathological if it's a habitual, crippling response reflecting a pervasively pessimistic attitude--people who suffer from PAPD expect disappointment, and gain a sense of control over their lives by bringing it about. Some psychiatrists have suggested that PAPD be merged into a broader category, called negativistic personality disorder. Diagnostic criteria: passive-aggressive plus (a) mad at the world, (b) envious and resentful, (c) feels cheated by life, and (d) alternately hostile and clingy.

We'll let the specialists work out the details. For now, though, we lay folk should strive to use the term "passive-aggressive" more precisely in everyday life. Say for instance that a coworker cheerfully agrees to refrain from a specified uncool act, then does it anyway. Is this passive-aggressive behavior? No, this is being an asshole. Comforting as it can be to pigeonhole our tormentors with off-the-shelf psychiatric diagnoses, sometimes it's best just to call a jerk a jerk.

So passive-aggressive behavior isn't necessarily indicative of a disorder, but it's still really tough to deal with. I think that out in the open is the best way to deal with conflict (although I can't claim to practice this with 100% success), and passive-aggressive behavior makes dealing with conflict particularly difficult. I mean, that's the point of passive-aggressive behavior: to display frustration and anger in some oblique, unaddressable way.

To take an example from my next citation, a student may have difficulty with a math problem, and feel bad about himself because he can't do it. Rather than express the feelings of frustration and inadequacy, the student will act out in some other way. This acting out results in some sort of punishment or conflict. Now, rather than expressing negative feelings about himself, the teacher is expressing negative things about the student. Instead of feeling inadequate, the student feels sorry for himself, as the victim of unfair punishment.

The following comes from Passive Aggressive Behavior... preventing and dealing with challenging behavior at the preschool behavior project. Now, this is directed at preschool teachers, but really it has some insights for dealing with passive-aggressive behavior:

When you recognize the student displaying annoying, attention-seeking behavior, remember that this stems from frustration. The student needs support. If a student is working on a math assignment, you might approach the student by saying, "Ripping up math papers is not acceptable, John. Let's get you another and I'll sit down with you and we can work on it together." In this way, you are letting the student know that you do not accept his or her behavior but you are not nagging. You are also letting the student know that you care and want to help.

So I guess it's a matter of finding balance. Sometimes the appropriate reaction is to "call a jerk a jerk", and other times it is to address frustration and provide support. I know I have a tendency to psychologize (is that a word?) my conflicts and am guilty of hiding behind off-the-shelf psychology terms I don't fully understand. I guess the thing to do is articulate how the behavior makes me feel rather than just trying to label it.

They're inside my head!

Or at least they will be. I've volunteered as a subject for an fMRI experiment. That means they'll be scanning my head this weekend as I stare at a moving image for a long time. Sweet.

The only suprising thing about this article is how baldfaced it is. Nobody's suprised we're going after Iran, nobody's suprised the justification is 9/11 and nukes. Nothing new about pointing at injustice and totalitarianism. But here's how stupid they think we are:

Paragraph 1
"Bush said the CIA has found no sign of a direct connection between Iran and the suicide hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people."

Paragraph 3
Bush: "I have long expressed my concerns about Iran. After all, it is a totalitarian society where free people are not allowed to exercise their rights as human beings."

Oh, well... the CIA found nothing... but the President says he has concerns. Sounds legit... and then, all the way down in:

Paragraph 8 (really... who reads that many paragraphs anyway)
"On Monday, Bush accused Iran of harboring suspected al Qaeda members and developing nuclear weapons."

Ok, so that's how dumb we are supposed to be. CIA finds nothing, but Mr. President makes claims, so a war with those bad guys must be the right thing. Oh, and hey, it will fit right in, as yet another government we once propped up but are now going to invade. After all, all those damn AyRabs must be hating our freedom, so we better do something.

Let it be known that in general, I abhor squirrels. They are a stark reminder of the urban ecosystem. Humans have exploited the natural world and exterminated competing predators. Our sprawling use of land has eliminated most large animals and nearly all predators. We have left the small grazers and scavengers, both of which have developed a total lack of fear due to the large absence of predators. This is why I don't like squirrels. Squirrels that lounge in the open or eat a nut (or piece of garbage, more likely) in the middle of a sidewalk deserve to be eaten by a hawk or coyote or snake. OOPS! Humans have mostly exterminated those.

Ok, so that said, I witnessed some extraordinary squirrel behavior in the park today. The squirrel had piled together a few fallen leaves. It would stick its nose in the pile, then with its front paws it gathered the leaves tightly underneath its body. All of a sudden it would then leap into the air, using its rear legs to scatter the leaves as it pulled acrobatic tricks! It would do backflips, turn 360 and 540 degree turns, and twist itself around. It would then scamper in circles and repeat.

This went on for about three minutes. Then it noticed my bemused observation, and went and hid behind a tree. As I was leaving the park I saw (what was probably) that same squirrel toting a white paper napkin up a power pole. Now I understand why people would want to carry a camera all the time (such as those built into cellphones). I would have loved to have a great squirrel backflip shot for you all. As it is, I snagged a picture from the Campus Squirrel Listings Note, UC Berkeley gets the highest possible score.

I'm suddenly wanting to get an album from the X-ecutioners. Heard a song of theirs on a video game soundtrack, and suddenly, I want more!

Added a link to Bully Magazine. Unapologetic commentary. Especially check out their piss list.

Sometimes the government gets it right. That's right. I just said something positive about the department of homeland security (specifically their Computer Emergency Readiness Team). In fact, I applaud their bravery at standing up to one of the biggest corporations in the US.

For those not wanting to read the article: Oi! Internet Explorer has big problems and could cause you serious headaches, especially if you use the web for anything sensitive like banking or credit card transactions.

What to do? Get a different browser. There's lots available. To name just a few: Firefox, Mozilla, Opera. Those are the big three, anyway. They are all free, although Opera displays advertisements unless you pay, but it's not as bad as you might think. I recommend Firefox because the download is small (only 4.7 megs) and setup is quick. And if security isn't enough of a concern for you, try one of these anyway, just for tabbed browsing

Get Ready for Harry Potter VI

It's from Motley Fool, a major financial information portal. It's got some neat tid-bits including the title of the next book (warning in case you want to be surprised). I am all stoked about the upcoming movie and even more-so about the next book (although the release dates for neither have been set).

I was, however, somewhat horrified by this statement: "Prisoner of Azkaban has seen a sharp drop after an initial blockbuster opening weekend, and stands at $211.7 million to date. I suspect this is more an indication of mounting disappointment with the direction of new director Alfonso Cuaron -- who deviated drastically from the original course of the story -- than any waning interest in the franchise." Can this be true? I take his word on the income so far, i mean it's a financial website. but... but... did he really deviate from the story? Or was it just a different style? I liked the new style a lot, especially compared with the last one. I mean PLEASE! I just wanted to kick someone in the neck when they all applauded Hagrid at the end of the second movie. I mean, PUKE! Most of the kids don't really like Hagrid anyway, and that was SO not in the book.

Ok, I need to go take a time-out or something.

I was having a discussion about what would happen to you if you were exposed in deep space (ie without a space suit). There are a few considerations for what would happen. This sort of event happens a lot in space movies, but the film industry doesn't really have a clear vision. The things I came up with to worry about are:

1. ~0 atmospheres of pressure
2. very low (like, a few kelvin) temperatures
3. radiation

so what really would happen? My guess is that the zero atmospheres of pressure would do you in first. Your innards would probably come exploding out of your body, and those that couldn't get out would just pop.

Of course, freezing isn't too healthy either. And if you live through that, the X-rays and such would probably be pretty uncomfortable.

Here's the simile I came up with:

You could compare being in deep space to floating down the Amazon river on your back with your ass painted red and honey on your belly. It's hard to say what would get you first, but you're pretty much fucked.

So I did some google searches, and i'm pretty much completely wrong. According to info on this nasa page, "If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. ... exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness." However, the radiation would be problematic after much of any time.

What Would John Titor Do?

So it's probably an elaborate hoax. It's well thought out and cleanly presented though. Well worth the read, even if just for the discussion of black holes. And if it's not a hoax, well, read up on what to do when the civil war breaks out.

Don't have much to say, but I updated my subtitle and added a link. Micromoe is a friend of mine, and I recommend checking out some of the music he's got posted.

I'm thinking it's about time to have a party so people can see my place.

Google 'Related Searches' has changed my life. Well, ok maybe only a little bit, but still. (warning, I'm about to do another of my ever-popular 'this is how we should vote' posts.)

Google told me a related search to my blog was tactical voting. It's the practice of voting not for the candidate you sincerely prefer, but because you believe it's the vote most likely to produce a favorable outcome. This lead me to read about Approval Voting where you put a mark next to every candidate you think would be allright. It has some good advantages (see the linked article for good descriptions) but one I had never considered was that it is pretty compatible with existing voting infrastructures.

Tactical voting seems so insincere to me. I'd love to be able to vote for a candidate I actually like without increasing the chances of a candidate I definitely don't like being elected.

Academic Economist Studies Everquest

So this somewhat failed economist got hooked on Everquest (an online fantasy based role-playing game). He suddenly had this brainstorm that because Everquest items were being sold for real currency that he could legitamately apply economic theory to the online world. It's as though Everquest is another country with its own internal economy and industry. He did some calculations and got some interesting results. He averaged some online to real transactions and calculated an exchange rate of about 100 EQ platinum pieces(PP) to 1 USD. That makes EQPP a stronger currency than the Japanese Yen! Average EQ player income about 3.50 USD/hour. Better than minimum wage a lot of places. It turns out that Everquest is about the 77th strongest economy in the world!

It's a very long article but well worth the read if you're interested in online games. Here is the professor's professional page and a list of publications you can download and read.

This was covered on Slashdot today, too so sorry if this is redundant for you slashdorks.

The eye of Sauron is REAL!

Ok, really this is the Nautilus Laser weapon system. Yeah, a laser gun. It successfully shot down some missles and stuff. It's looking like an effective anti-missile system. And we (the US) helped Israel develop it. So now we've not only given Israel nukes, we've also made them missile proof. Here's a recent article about it from MSNBC, from whom the picture also comes.

As some of you may know, I work in a vision science lab. This week is the sweeps of optometry and vision science. There are currently not one but TWO big conferences going on, one on each side of Florida, of all places. One is called Arvo, and the other is called Vss ('cause I know you care).

Anyway, the result is this: Little me in a big empty building. Ok, so it's not really empty, there are at least ten other people, but here's the thing: I don't work for any of them. Everyone that cares even a little bit about me doing my job is on the other side of the frikkin country, which is probably why i'm posting this from work.

So I'm torn between working (pfft), spending all day doing stuff like this, or just going home really early. I predict some mix of options two and three with a little of option one thrown in for guilt-prevention.

Ok folks, just a reminder: rugby this weekend! But, it turns out I was wrong. Or rather, I was right but then erroneously corrected myself. So...

Rugby this Friday and Saturday. I can't make it to the Friday match, so I'll be at the Saturday matches. How incredibly lame is it to have a national sporting even in the middle of the day on a friday? How lame I ask you? VERY! Anyway, the national championship is Saturday at 4pm at Stanford's Steuber Field.

I hope to see you there.

Allright, some of you may remember how I was all excited about Instant Runoff Voting a while back. I have since heard about something called the Condorcet method. For a full rundown, check out the wikipedia article on Condorcet method.

Anyway, IRV still seems like a pretty good idea to me, as it solves some (but not all) of the problems with simple Most-Votes-Wins solutions like ours. However, there is a case where IRV will choose a canditate such that there is another candidate more people prefer. That's confusing and abstract, so if you car, check out the example from the wikipedia article.

I haven't looked at any of the implementations of the Condorcet method suggested in the article, but a major weakness I see, and I emphasize it is major, is how complicated the Condorcet method seems. I don't think the American populace is going to buy any voting system that can't be explained in a few sentences. To whit:
"Everybody votes for one person. The person with the most votes wins." -> "Hyup, sounds good"
"Everybody ranks all the canditates, putting a 1 by their favorite, 2 by their second favorite, and so forth. We tally everyone's first choices, and if no candidate gets a majority, then we eliminate the candidate with the least votes. Then ballots are re-calculated where if the highest ranked candidate is eliminated, we look at the next highest ranked candidate. After that, if there is still no majority, we eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes again and repeat." -> "Hmm... I guess that sounds allright..."

I won't even try with condorcet.... Anyway, our election system needs to change and IRV is still the best thing i've seen so far.

Emergency update! Sorry i'm a dork, a rugby press release announced the finals as being April 30th/May 1st. That's WRONG! The rugby finals are Saturday May 1st and Sunday May 2nd. And Yay for Vicious Kitty!!!

Well it was a great weekend for Cal rugby, with victories on Saturday and Sunday. It was an exciting match against Bowling Green State U (their uniforms are orange and brown. Why not green? That's what I was wondering, too.), with the bears entering the half down by two. Cal roared back in the second half for a big win.

I didn't make it to the game on Sunday of Cal vs. North Carolina Tarheels, but I guess it was a total blowout. So what does that mean? It means I expect to see each and every one of you in Palo Alto on April 30/May 1 for the final four. Give 'em the old growl cheer. Anybody needing a ride down should contact me, I may be heading down Fri. Night, but if not, i'm happy to give rides.

Oh, here's the official recap articles from the Cal Rugby site: Cal Varsity Defeats Bowling Green State, 40-15 and Bears Rout The Tar Heels, 69-11 .

Also, LAYT's "Alice" is opening Friday, the 29th. It should be a lot of fun. I've seen some of the costumes, and they look cool. Here's a link to LAYT and to the show information.

It came up at work today. One of the guys at work who graduated from Stanford was talking some trash about how yeah, Cal rugby is pretty good, but isn't Stanford better? Now, it's no secret that i'm a big Cal Rugby fan, so I informed him that in recent history, Cal has beat Stanford to a bloody pulp every time they met. Stanford-guy was skeptical. Then fellow Cal Enthusiast Allen piped in with "oh, well, except for two years ago when Stanford backed out of the game". Stanford guy was incredulous. "No Way!" he said. Allen: "Hey, you can find it on Google!".

So I did. In no particular order:
Stanford's rugby forfeit is downright cowardly
and
Email correspondence between Cal and Stanford rugby coaches.

Ok so the first one an Oakland Tribune columnist going off on cowardice, and the second is from a Cal supporters website. Let's look for some Stanford perspective (although, really, didn't we get enough of that from the e-mail from Stanfurd's coach, Franck Boivert?)
Ruggers Forfeit Their Big Game

It's brief, but still manages to take a quote out of context and, in my opinion, to mangle the intention. I was going to let it slide, but then I looked up the quote in the actual context. What the stanford article claims Clark said: "We take great umbrage ... How dare you not compete." What Clark said in context: "We do however take great umbrage at the content of your letter of forfeit." ... [skip two full paragraphs] ... "Lastly, I found your closing comment concerning rugby one day being 'again a sport for the students' insulting to the very ethos of sport. How dare you not compete and belittle the accomplishments of those who do."

Anything else from the Stanford side of it? Well, if there is, I can't find it. However, I just found an interview with Stanfurd's current Chairman of Development and Treasurer for their rugby foundation. Yancey does mention the forfeiture but doesn't comment much about it. What I found particularly salient, especially considering Boivert's comments about Cal being better because they have funding etc, was this passage about Stanford rugby's endowment: "It is my understanding that this sum probably places Stanford in second place behind Cal when it comes to US college rugby endowments." Ok, so Cal's is bigger, but second place is no position from which to whine about funding. To be fair, that's the situation now, and I have no real evidence about the situation three years ago.

So here's my conclusion from all this. Stanford's forfeiture was a totally spineless move. They let fail a nearly century-old tradition because they were afraid of being injured. I can't blame them, really, for being afraid. The break in the tradition is unfortunate. The lack of courage is embarrassing, but forgivable. I mean, these Cal guys are really big and strong. The unforgivable thing was Boivert's response. He took cheap shots at Clark and Cal Rugby. Rather than facing the fact that he had failed as a coach to prepare his team to play Cal, he tried to blame Cal. He looked for excuses. Instead, he took his team to Fiji. (Yeah, if you read the Oakland Tribune column, the coach took the team to the Fiji Islands instead of to the Cal rugby match) So he further failed to fight the stereotype of pampered, spoiled Stanford brats.

But really, I guess, that's how you become successfull in the real world. If you can win, kick their teeth in. If you can't, go to Fiji.

Cal Rugby
Stanford Rugby

From the latest Cat and Girl:
Teacher: "Follow your dreams."
Girl: "My dream leads to scurvy."

Ok, it's official. No more reference to Belgian Bluesbands in my subtitle. I have begun a new rotation of subtitles. I have found a pretty good source for subtitles, and as the source changes, I will change my subtitle. Five points to the person that correctly identifies the source.

And, I will mention (because I see some of you in the back becoming a little anxious), this blog will remain forever "Fair and Balanced Blogification", so fear not!

I was taken with a sudden urge to play ATTACK! earlier today. Which got me thinking about Luke. That guy must have a web page. Anybody know what it is? And how his job at Sega is going. and stuff. Anyway, hope some of y'all make it for the rugby match tomorrow!

Ok, it's time for another rugby update.

Sadly, the Bears did not win the rugby world cup this season. The world cup is so-called because it's a contest between the (traditionally) best Canadian team and the (traditionally) best American team. They play two matches (one at each home pitch) and the team with the combined highest total score wins. I don't know why they don't call it the North America's cup, but hey, since we often win, I don't mind it being the world cup. Hey, how about we call it the world cup when the bears win, but north america's cup when the Thunderbir wins. Ok, so to get on with it,

The UBC Thunderbirds won the North America's Rugby Cup last Saturday, defeating the bears 26-17. It must have been a great match. You can read the recap if you're interested.

In more rugby news, the Bears will be demolishing Cal Poly this Saturday. It should actually be a pretty good match, with Cal Poly coming in as the #1 seed for Southern California, and, of course, the Bears as #1 for Northern California. Match details. The game's at 1 o'clock on Witter field, and you can sure expect to see me there.

In other sports news, I guess the baseball season has started. I don't know this because I pay attention to baseball, or because I happened to hear the match on the radio, or because I actually care, no. No, I know because, well, the radio has once again started talking about the scandal with the stupid performance enhancing drugs (and I don't mean the Levitra kind).

Look people, as a culture we worship sports heros. We pay them stupid amounts of money to be good at a game. If you don't want fools to do drugs to be better, stop caring so much about who's the best. Hell, go watch little-league or something, and find out which little kid works the hardest in practice, and cheer for her, or him, or whatever. If you do care about who's the best, go watch TV and see some drugged up dude hit the ball over the fence 44 times. Either way, enjoy, but stop clogging up public airwaves with your whining about moral decline and integrity.

I saw two weird things today as I walked to the grocery store.

1 I live next to an Italian/Pizza restraunt. It's a bit pricey, but very tasty. I recommend the pizza for two. Anyway, I noticed a flyer hanging from the front door of said restraunt (they're closed on Tuesdays). The flyer was for, get this, another pizza place! Anyway, I thought it was kind of funny.

2 In front of the grocery store are a bunch of newspaper vending machines (a new one showed up just a couple days ago, selling Yank!, sorry couldn't find a link), and anyway, I noticed a sticker on one. And on another. And on the garbage can down the street. And on the back of the bus stop bench. Reading:

Free Identity!
name: Chris Gunderson
SSN: some number
DOB: some date in the 60s

Weird. I wonder if it's a real person? and if this is someone with a vendetta, or just some random identity they found? Weird.

YES!!! My old gameboy still works! I was gonna type something about exectly why Microsoft's monopoly is such a BadThing, but instead I think i'll play tetris. At least for now.

So at work I'm helping my boss migrate from Mac to PC. Ironically, I'm using a Linux machine as the middleman for this particular transfer. I know very little about using the Linux command line, so I am looking for good (free) resources online to help me learn. I found this article on using bash and it seems to be directed at people familiar with Windows. Anyway, thought i'd throw that up there, although it's mostly a convenient way for me to remember the link when I go home and want to read more of the article.

It seems like, in general, it would be a lot easier to convince people to use Linux if there were more resources like this out there. All the help i've been able to get comes in the form of: figure out what program you want to use, then read the manual for that program (as an aside, I've found that reading the manual is sometimes pretty hard due to lack of examples). While this advice is very sound, as a Windows user I know my goal (for instance, unzip a file and put its contents into a new directory), but have no clue of what I should use. Does anyone know of a good listing that says, "ok windoze users, if you want to do x, the commonly used Linux equivalents are a, b, c, and sometimes d." Or am I going about this the wrong way?

So i've been reading some people's blogs, and damn, we're all about the organized sports! Specifically Samay and Jennie (and friends) have mentioned sports (baseball, hockey, basketball). Then I realized I recently made 3 posts in a row about Rugby. After some consideration, I have decided that organized sports are as reasonable a hobby as any (including one of my favorites, being a NEEEEEEEERD).

However, I certainly sympathize with Calvin's various complaints about organized sports. So, as an hommage to Calvin's ideology, I would like to present you all with Calvinball.

Thank goodness for friends. I'd been feeling lonely, and out of the blue, three different friends I hadn't talked to in a while contacted me. Yay friends!

Since I got all excited about EoTL in the last post, I wanted to try a link that did this: Telnet!

This one's for all y'all that ever logged onto that wacky Multi User Dungeon, EOTL.
Blizzard has just started up the beta test of their upcoming World of Warcraft (WoW). I took a look at the WoW info page, and I'll be darned if this doesn't sound an awful lot like EoTL but with pictures, especially in terms of dieing. Of course the info page probably only gives a small notion of what the game's really like. Anyway, I probably don't have time to play, but if I did I bet I would enjoy WoW as much as I did EoTL, which was a lot.

As an aside, EoTL seems to still be going strong (at least as of a few months ago). Some of the same people, a lot of the same areas, and all the same complaining. Interesting thing about that place, every time I go back I discover something I missed when I was there before. It's not as fun without a bunch of buddies playing, though. I heard rumors that Tim still hangs around there sometimes.

IGN insider has a collection of articles about Lionhead's upcoming release, Black & White 2. I really liked parts of the original, but it seemed like trying to be a good diety involved way too much minutia. However, when I wasn't constantly trying to water trees so my people would have enough wood to build enough houses to support the big population I needed to get enough prayer power to cast my spells to water my trees... Yeah, when I wasn't doing that, the game was pretty awesome. Maybe I'll pick up B&W 2 once it hits the bargain bins.

Ok, while I'm at it, what's up with suddenly seeing &apos; on lots of pages? Could be coincidence. I just assumed it was IE6 being lame, but I looked at webmonkey and their list of special characters didn't include apos; Anybody know what's up? And I know i'm supposed to be running mozilla or something, i'll get to it one of these days.

Allen recently pointed us to ongoing, and it had this bit about blogs. I liked it, so I want to share it with the world:
"Anyone who has a platform for daily venting is subject to temptation to daily venting about things that are at best ephemeral; and although this is one of the charms of the universe of weblogs, I'm going to try not to."

So I think i'm going to go for the Sapphire Radeon 9600. It's selling at newegg.com for $95.50. But then I looked at the performance jump from the 9600 to the 9600 pro for only 35 dollars more. But then I noticed rumors that the even newer 9600 XT comes with a coupon for Half-Life 2 for FREE! (but the card costs about 40 bucks more than the pro).

My info on the specs etc comes from a couple of reviews from Tom's Hardware (I hate the ads, but the reviews are usually pretty solid). About the 9600 series and 9600XT vs 9600Pro

So I think the conclusion I'm heading toward is the 9600 because it's cheaper and has no fan, so it won't create cacophony in my computer. Then again, for 75 bucks more I get a pretty big jump in performance AND free halflife 2 (when it comes out) (which could be years from now).

Ok, i'm looking for a fairly cheap graphics card to replace the one I have because i suspect it's causing me trouble. I'd like my new card to be at least a little better than my old one (ATI Radeon 8500 AIW), and to not be more than 100 bucks. Leave a comment if you have a suggestion, or if you find a web resource with info that would be useful. Thanks everyone!

Pictures from the past

Benjamin Files

Some funny quotes I've heard/read recently:

"Today people are already talking seriously about living on the moon and then on Mars. I hope that Ukraine will also be involved in this process. Ukrainians simply must travel to the moon! Not all of them, of course. Somebody must stay for the flight to Mars"
-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, from a statement reported in this article

"Why is it not displaying? This is a Mac!!!"
-A frustrated post-doc trying to set up for a presentation using a Macintosh

"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac."
-Dave Thomas, FBI, as reported in this column.

Ok, to be perfectly honest, two of those came from a 'neat quotes' bit in a magazine I read. But they're still fun/interesting.

This just in! The rugby national final four is at Stanfurd this year! I am so there.

Ok, this is just a heads-up for all you ruggers out there: Cal Men's Rugby plays in Berkeley this weekend at 1:00 pm [schedule]. All y'all are welcome to come have a beer or just hang out at my place before the game. Maybe we'll get some pizza or something. Let me know if you're interested.

For related news, click the pic.

There was a neato article in New Scientist about 3D microfabrication. They made reference to a lab at UC Berkeley that is working on designing 3D micro-structures using the principles used in pop-up books. I found the page of Elliot Hui, who was probably a grad student under the professor that got all the credit for the work. From the page, it looks like it was really Hui doing the research. Anyway, here's Hui's page for anyone interested.

The reason this all caught my attention was this awesome picture of a micro-scale model of UC Berkeley's Sather Tower:

The actual model is 1.8mm tall! And there are actual Roman Numerals on the clock face! So cool.

My former boss (with whom I currently work) has asked me to come troubleshoot a program I wrote about a year ago. I'm scared that i'll go and feel obligated to do hours and hours of work, but I won't feel comfortable charging him for that many hours... but at the same time, I don't want to give up my free time for, well, free.

On an entirely unrelated topic, here's a nice set of FAQs for anyone interested in learning about Multiple Sclerosis.