Gullible's Travels

Taken in Curacao, outside an abandoned church. Head wound and amputation not withstanding, it was a pretty mellow scene.

Now that I've started taking photos again, I'm feeling the need to work through my backlog, so expect more to pop up.

I was told this was apt, so perhaps it's worth posting. My impression Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

The 20? 40? page monologue at the end where one of the characters expounds massively upon Ayn Rand's philosophy was a bit like being repeatedly bludgeoned in the shins and groin by a midget wielding a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species: you can't help but think that good logic is being put to use in horribly fallacious ways, and at the end of it you feel a bit dirty for even allowing the midget near enough to you to get a good whack in.

Or something like that.

To all my libertarian friends: I still love you.

A little late for Valentine's day, but pretty nonetheless. I made it out of math. Okay, actually by using a tool called Fyre. Flickr has another gallery of other objects made with the same software.

This was happening over at facebook, but might as well post it here too. Feel free to skip past.

(I generally avoid these things but everyone else's I've read has been interesting, so I decided to join in. This took me a while to write, as I was trying to think of things most of you wouldn't know.)

1. I've shaken hands with the president of Kazakhstan (Nursultan Nazarbayev), but not any of the presidents of the United States.

2. I'm solar powered. I am *much* more productive in the summer months than the winter.

3. My upper front teeth have extra cusps behind them, which amaze all the dentists and hygenists I've ever had. I'm one in a million, they tell me. And here I thought my mother was just trying to boost my morale.

4. My parents separated when I was six, and everyone was the better for it.

5. When I was a committed vegetarian for a couple of years (and 90% raw-foodist by accident), I slept 6 hours a night and felt completely perky. Now I sleep 8 and wake up tired. Hmm. Anyway, I went back to meat only because I wasn't doing vegetarianism very well, and my weight dropped so low I was fainting from time to time (I was also exercising twice a day, and taking 22 units of physics/math -- that may have had something to do with it too...). However, I no longer eat red meat, partly because it's so hard on the environment, partly because it just doesn't *taste* good to me any more. Vegetarianism changed my taste buds, I think.

6. I love watching (college) basketball, but almost no other sport. Not even waterpolo, which I love playing.

7. I clean my house when I'm trying to avoid doing something unpleasant.

8. When I was a in sixth grade, I was in a competition to solve the Rubik's cube. I did it in 33 seconds, though I have no memory of what place I finished. I think it was somewhere 4th-7th. We were all really into the cube back then :-).

9. I've been working, on and off, on a wacky physics theory of light and space. If I ever finish it, it'll put me quite firmly into the crackpot fringe of science, but there's some good company out there.

10. I believe, in my core, that the only thing that matters on this planet is how we treat people. (Treating the environment well, for example, can be understood as treating well those yet unborn.) Everything else is some set of arbitrary goals and made up rules and games, none of which will survive us. And remember, your own self is people too, so treat yourself well along with the rest.

11. For me, the hardest part of any job is starting it. Once I have my momentum going, it's cake, and it gets hard to stop.

12. I used to have long, thick, curly hair, down to the middle of my back. Twice. I cut it the first time because of the sixth month job in Kazakhstan, and I was told that only drug dealers have long hair, and did I want to get a cavity search when I entered the borders? The second time I cut it, I'd gotten bored of having long hair and decided it was time for something different.

13. I was born in SLO, but have lived elsewhere most of my life.

14. When driving on the highway, I can smell if someone in the car in front of me is smoking.

15. I can read upside-down nearly as quickly as right-side up, but sideways gives me fits.

16. I was a Catholic altar boy for several years, 2nd-5th grades. The Catholic part didn't take. I'm pretty sure the altar boy part didn't either :-).

17. I love making things. While I'm an agnostic with atheist leanings, I feel that if we *are* made in our creator's image, then we should like making things too. Sometimes, though, I wish I worked in a different medium than software. It'd be nice to have others appreciate the artwork that goes into some of the things I've created. I have some sympathy for plumbers and electricians -- like them, no one notices the things I make unless they stop working.

18. I swim primarily for mental health. Any physical benefits that come out of exercising are purely incidental.

19. I'm a bit of a reading addict, like many others. I've gone through periods where I'd read up to three books a day. I have a large collection of dead tree editions of books that I want to give away now, and bit by bit want them all electronic. I also have a reader's vocabulary, which means I'll pick odd words sometimes, and mispronounce others when I haven't heard them said by anyone before.

20. I've been transitioning, slowly, to a mostly raw (aka 'living') food diet. My energy levels are a lot better, and I'm noticing benefits across the board. I still like bacon, though, much to my semi-dismay.

21. I rarely think in words. I don't really know how to describe how I think, other than I visualize. A lot. Except it's mostly abstract. And things move. And there's circus animals. Okay, not the last bit, but everything else. (When I do think in words, sometimes it's in someone else's voice, if I'm having a mental conversation with them.)

22. I've made 20 or so batches of home-brew beer, and they've all turned out fantastic (only thing you have to do is have good recipes and be very, very clean). I'd love to make wine, too. Everyone I know who's done both claims the wine is easier, but I find it more intimidating. I think because with wine you need to start with good grapes, and that's most of the battle right there. I'd have no *control* over the process other than choosing the fruit, and I think the lack of control bothers me. Of course, I've got no clue, since I haven't done it yet :-).

23. I only mind about control when I'm making or responsible for something. Most of the time, I'd much rather someone *else* were in control and I just follow their lead. It's a nice change of pace from my day job.

24. The closest thing to major network news that I watch is The Daily Show. Sad that comedy is more trustworthy than the nightly news. But then again, some of the funniest humor is based in the truth. Nightly news programs have no such constraint.

25. I can have music running through my head for hours, often without noticing. Sometimes I turn on the radio to drown out the station in my brain.

For years now, I’d believed it was just a dream.

I was young, adrift for a half year in a far off land veiled by the bitter cold of winter. Later, when I’d asked people about what I thought I saw, none had seen it, or even knew what I was talking about. I decided it was the alcohol, or the -40° weather playing tricks with my eyes.

But it happened. I know now, because someone else snapped a picture of the same thing, in another place.



It was a weird sort of relief to see this again, 15 years later, to regain a small bit of faith in my brain and memories. It existed, it’s weather playing tricks with the ice crystals in the air, with an interaction of the warmth from the lights in the still air causing a change in the way it transmits light. At some point the column of warm air cools and the air above that goes back to it’s normal dispersive self.

Pretty.

Thank you, Astronomy Picture of the Day.

(subtitled: I'm a social network whore)

I got suckered into joining twitter (as madrabbit) and LinkedIn (here) recently, the former to get live updates on where everyone was on a bar crawl, the latter because a friend of 16 years is losing her job (WaMu) and needs to 'network' (hate that term) to find a new one.

I'm ray on delicious if you want to see the random stuff I bookmark. t_rabbit on flickr (really need to start uploading my backlog of photos).

I'm not on facebook or WoW.

I'm probably forgetting, like, five.

Meme - take a snapshot of your workspace right now. Don't clean up.

Stolen from cambler. Gives me an excuse to break out the camera while I'm here.

I just realized I own seven bicycles. In my defense, three were gifts of sorts some time ago (two of which I'll be cleaning up and listing for sale soon), but geez, seven?

And only two of them are even at my house. (One in Morro Bay at a friend's that I cycle with regularly, one in San Jose with the rest of the bikes for our Burning Man camp, two down in Santa Maria at my old*3 place [getting moved today], and one at my most recent old place, the one I just bought from my housemate there. It's a really nice bridgestone touring bike that fits perfectly, and will let me get rid of yet another bike so I should be down to four after that, possibly three, but... silliness.)

And yeah, back from Burning Man. It was a pretty draining year, and no photos due to dust storms on the days I was going to head out, except for one of the days where my knee was tweaked. Oh well. Next year, I think I'm going to go somewhere wet that serves little drinks with umbrellas in them and fruit on a stick.

Wow, this is evil. Just by signing up for a dopplr account to let everyone know where I'm gonna be, it makes me want to travel more. What a crazy expensive website.

(Hmm, I guess the link page is only visible if you have a dopplr account. Sad. There's not much in there -- Burningman from August 22nd through September 1st/2nd, and New York City from October 7th through 14th. [Edit: mayhem_chaos pointed out how to make it public; thanks! Now I just need to attach it to my google calendar to make the updates automatic, and it'll be another Web 2.0 app I never have to think about again.] )

Yeah, I owe a massive update, including my new address. I'll do that next. Soon. -ish.

[I think most science writers should be shot. It's a perfect opportunity to engage the public in the wonder that is nature, and what do they do? They report on it like some engineering event, such as the tallest building made, or a fast plane.

About a month ago, a Gamma Ray Burster went off and set a new record for Biggest Boom Evah. The writeup was passionless, and since I was trying to avoid real work, I re-wrote it. I've been sitting on it as it needs editing, but if I wait for perfection I'll never post...]

[Edit: original NASA press release is here. Mine is very, very different.]

We can see about 9000 stars with the naked eye. Most of them are visible only because they are so close to us.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 200 billion stars in it. So for every star we can see, there are about 22 million others in our very own galaxy that are invisible to our eyes.

It takes about eight minutes for light from our Sun to reach Earth. It takes a full day to travel to the edge of our solar system — four times the distance of little Pluto — to reach interstellar space. After another four years of travel, that same light ray will finally reach our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri. (And light is the fastest thing we have! The fastest any human object has ever reached was about 100,000 miles per hour, by Pioneer 11 as it went past Jupiter. That's 1/60 of one percent of the speed of light.)

To span our whole galaxy, that same light ray would take 100,000 years. Said visually, if we made a scale model of our galaxy that were 100 miles across, our solar system would occupy about 1/7 of one inch. (Think of a city 100 miles away. Think of a disk from here to there, a mile high. That's the Milky Way galaxy to scale, with our solar system as a pin-head.)

To zoom out again, if our galaxy were a dime, our solar system would be 3000 times *smaller* than a single bacterium. Smaller, even, than a single virus.

Just as there are roughly 200 billion stars in our galaxy, there are also 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe, 92 billion light years across. Each of them has many, many stars as well.

If our galaxy were the size of a dime, the closest galaxy, Andromeda, is about eight inches away from us. In the rest of our local neighborhood, there are 20 galaxies total, 20 dimes scattered about in a space the size of a basketball.

The gamma ray burst occurred 7.5 billion years ago, placing it 46 billion light years away. That's 460,000 times the span of our dime galaxy model.

Put 460,000 dimes end to end, one after another, and you'll be five miles away from your starting point, where the gamma ray burster exploded. You'll still be 5 miles away from the edge of the visible universe in that direction, and 10 miles away from the edge in all the other directions as well. (The universe keeps going past that 'edge' — everything just gets too dim for us to see it.)

Something much smaller than a single atom on a dime five miles away exploded so violently, so energetically, that it lit up the entire universe for an hour. Even though there are roughly 20 billion galaxies in the chunk of the Universe that includes us and it, for an hour, it was brighter than all of them. Brighter than entire galaxies, brighter than most every star in our galaxy including most of those 9000 we can see with the naked eye.

During the first few seconds of its explosion, it released 1000 times as much energy as our sun will over it's entire lifetime. That's the energy of 1000 suns each working for 10 billion years, released in a few seconds. For those few seconds, gamma ray bursters release more wattage than the entire universe itself.

Gamma Ray Bursters occur about once a day.

Sucks for the critters in their neighborhood when they go off.

Safety tip: when tossing random veggies into the juicer for a drink, skip the jalapeños. Aerosolized capsaicin, oy.

~
I'm back from NY; no photos, sorry. I am finally caught up with my email backlog, which makes me happy. (~1400 spam, ~3500 normal messages, though I declared email bankruptcy on about 3200 of those that came in via one work-related email list.)

I'll be moving to somewhere else in SLO soon. Dunno where yet, but I'll letcha all know where I land. On that note, I've decided I want to buy a house around here, so I'm going to start taking on more jobs that I've been saying no to in the past. Given how irregularly I already update here, I doubt anyone will notice :-).

I'm coy and you fly   ~
together on mirror pond   ~
we dance, switching roles

The past seven days have had a lot of ticket action. My Burningman 2008 ticket arrived in the mail (finally), soul_sloshing managed to get me two tickets to see the Police in concert (each of which cost as much as my burningman ticket, oy), and I picked up a ticket for this year's Lighting in a Bottle held down at the Live Oak campgrounds.

It's been an expensive week. Luckily I'm working my ass off right now and can afford it.

Now I just need to find someone to go see The Police with me.

In particular, nano-art from a Scanning Electron Micrograph (SEM):



The above looks like a bunch of explosions, but there's a couple of catches. First, what you're seeing is tiny. Second, it's been colorized. Third, it's not actually a set of explosions (sorry) — the SEM is too slow to catch explosions in action. Still pretty, though. The original article has some other beautiful images from the nano-world all around us.
¶
Another link, this time with more intentional art rather than repurposed images from someone's doctoral thesis. SpaceCollective is a so-called "Human aesthetic aggregation experiment." It's regularly updated, and has things both from the world of science and math, as well as the more traditional avenues of art. Each of the images links to the source site with more information, so it's the kind of thing you can spend hours with.

Well, I can, anyway :-).

Actually not oil, but aged scotch with a snake marinated inside. A Chinese cure-all that I like to call 'snotch.' Taken in China, 2002. One of my fellow travellers had a shot of the infused scotch, and I tasted a little bit when he was mostly done. We both agreed that it tasted like chicken.

Okay, not really. Perhaps if I were a scotch connoisseur I could have noticed the delicate hint of serpent laying underneath — oh, I give. It was scotch, scotch is nasty, and the snake didn't make it any better.

Oh Fuji apples, how I love thee. But squirting out these money shots all over my laptop screen has got to stop.

<goes and gets kleenex>

It's days like today that make me wish I were a theist, so that I could drop to my knees and ask God to grant me patience and tact. Guess I'm going to have to do it the hard way instead.

Anyway, life is finally quieting down after the Big Frickin' Camping Trip, so y'all will see more of me around. Be forewarned :-).

Just finished Grendel (of Beowulf fame), by John Gardner, © 1971. What a fucking amazing book. I'm still digesting it for now, but it's gotta be one of the best pieces of literary fiction I've read in years [*]. On the face of it, you could be forgiven for thinking it would be like Wicked as both books are retold from the antagonists' point of views. However, Grendel is unapologetically a bad-ass. He's not 'just misunderstood' -- he does do evil things -- but he's also cursedly sane and entirely human.

* Okay, so it's the only piece of literary fiction I've read in years.

The book is densely layered, and works very well. If you like the that side of fiction (or even if you think you might), it's worth a read. I borrowed the copy I read, but I'm ordering one as a loaner soon.

It opens:

The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant. I blink. I stare in horror. "Scat!" I hiss. "Go back to your cave, go back to your cowshed—whatever." He cocks his head like an elderly, slow-witted king, considers the angles, decides to ignore me. I stamp. I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl a skull-sized stone at him. He will not budge. I shake my two hairy fists at the sky and I let out a howl so unspeakable that the water at my feet turns sudden ice and even I myself am left uneasy. But the ram stays; the season is upon us. And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war.

War with king Hrothgar. More via Amazon's reader thingie. Click on the gray bar on the right side of the image to flip the page.

~
Back from Seattle, where I took many pics of people you don't know. Well, and another Dahlia:


~
Sometime in the past month, someone turned me on to the now defunct band Splashdown. They've released all their music to the public as free downloads, and a bunch of the stuff is great, in a Sneaker Pimps sort of way. Sugar High (mp3) is probably a good place to start. All the albums and other material can be found here. There's a lot of stuff, so start with Blueshift and work from there. I'm merely six years out of date on discovering them, rather than 36 with Grendel.

Two kinds of squash, arugula, collards, raddicchio, red oak leaf lettuce, mache, butter leaf, red and green leaf lettuce, romaine, mint, chard, tomatoes and more tomatoes, a hedge of basil, nasturtiums, sage, oregano, thyme, flat and curly parsley, lemon cucumbers, fresno peppers, bell peppers, chives, garlic, eggplant, snap peas, beans, broccoli, cilantro, tarragon, thai basil, shallots, dill, cabbage, lemons, oranges, and strawberries, with plenty of sunflowers dotting the landscape.

I've never had a garden even a tenth this size. I'm probably forgetting something, too.

When things quiet down in a month or two, I'll be sending out an email for a pesto night at my place, I think. All that basil has to go somewhere :-).

I indulged all three of my addictions this weekend. (Ranked by dollars spent over my lifetime.)

On Friday, I finally pulled my really nice audio setup, speakers and all, up to my new place. Of course, once I got it all hooked up I found out that the foam surrounding the woofers is rotting away (I didn't even know it could do that!), so after an hour of frantic googling I found out what was going on, and that a $25 'refoam kit' would let me fix it. Ordered, though I'm probably going to go listening for a new set of speakers here soon. Despite all that, it's nice to have my system here, and I've been listening to music all weekend.

I got the latest and last book yesterday -- I won't insult your intelligence by giving you the name. It was fun wandering downtown and seeing all the kids lined up at midnight Friday, but said lines were so frickin' long I didn't pick my copy up until Saturday mid-day. Spent the rest of the day, on and off, reading it. It was quite good.

And I had two cups of coffee today, how indulgent is that? Okay, not very, but I enjoyed it. The second cup also helped given that I needed to deal with the thousand pounds of tree limb that came crashing down Friday night around 11:30pm. My backyard now has a couple of neat piles of green waste that will go out over the next few weeks, and a bunch of denuded limbs that have a chainsaw in their future.

Speaking of which, off to get it...

(Ps. I'm tempted to set this post's Mood to Chipper, but I just can't bring myself to inflict that kind of pun on y'all.)