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!

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.