Half Awake

You know when you’re chatting with someone on IM, and you are in the middle of typing a message, and the other person types something that somehow makes what you are in the process of typing invalid or irrelevant? For example, they say what you were going to say before you say it?

When this happens, do you ever send your message anyways, in effect pretending that you didn’t see their message before you sent yours?

Does anyone know if there is a name for this behavior?  Maybe something like selective conversaton reorganization?

1. People who talk to you while you’re going.
2. Lack of ventilation.
3. No paper towels.
4. People who “forget” to flush.
5. The automatic toilets that flush while you’re still using them.
6. People who don’t wash their hands.
7. Stalls without doors.
8. Urinals where the urine splashes on you no matter how careful you are.
9. People who pee on the toilet paper.
10. People who talk on their cell phones in the stall.
11. People who rub one out in the stall.
12. Being 9 years old and having women ask me if I was a boy or a girl because my mother insisted that I come into public restrooms with her for my safety.

Any others?

Thanks to Paul for help with this list during a boring seminar.

Clark, Kara’s a lot of things…  Reckless, headstrong, possibly psychotic.  But she’s wrong about you.

-Chloe Sullivan, Smallville Season 7 Finale

It’s lines like this that make it 100% baffling that Smallville is headed for it’s eighth season.  “Superman in high school” has become “Superman is unemployed four years out of high school, whines a lot about how things would be better if he had never come to Earth, and spends way too much time running to Metropolis.”  The season finale raises a lot of questions about destiny and whether Kal El is here to save Earth or to destroy it, and it was actually a decent episode overall.  When they do these story lines, you know, the ones related to the actual premise of the show, I don’t mind watching Smallville.  I especially like episodes where they try to tie in Justice League or other D.C. themes.  What makes me dry heave a little here is that I can now plan on watching at least fifteen episodes about “meteor freaks” that basically rehash and recycle episodes from every previous season.

Informal Poll: Does the song you’re listening to while driving affect the speed and/or aggression with which you drive?

(more…)

I’m not going to review Harold and Kumar, but I will say that it made me feel… conflicted. My favorite part was the poem that Kumar recited near the end, which is apparently a real poem by David Feinberg:

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

-David Feinberg

This is how I wish I applied my creativity more often. The lives of scientists are sad irrationalities.

The Intro to Culinary Arts course I’m in has a final lab practical, where me and a group of three other “chefs” have to prepare a six course meal for the teaching staff. As part of that exam, we’re expected to provide a dinner menu “like what you would get in a restaurant.”

Somehow my menu planning got out of control, and I decided to not only name our restaurant when making the menu, but also to do up a Benedict’s website, complete with company history and restaurant recipes. This is all really ridiculous, because it’s quite likely that the teaching staff won’t even see the URL on the menu.

It’s pretty good so far, but I’d really welcome suggestions. In particular:

• What do you think of the menu descriptions? I’d love to hear some over-the-top humorous suggestions, particularly if they fall into our theme.
• Is the theme clear?
• We need a logo. Any ideas?
• Any suggestions for news posts I could put on the “home” page?
• The Recipes are still in progress.
• Any other ideas are welcome!

My practical is this Wednesday at 5:00 PM.

The Daily Show seems to have portrayed the demographic game perfectly in this clip. The interviewees they show are clearly not cool which being politically profiled, and the piece is a nice tongue-in-cheek way of looking at something I was complaining about early this season.

Link via Feministing.

I’ve been taking a 14 week Intro to Culinary Arts class for fun, and it’s been… delicious. So far, I’ve consistently forgotten to bring my camera in to record the finished products every week, but I couldn’t resist snapping a cell-phone shot of the braised lamb shanks we made recently.

Our side dishes that night: Whipped potatoes with rutabaga, and French-style peas.

Other main courses served that night: Vegetarian Chili, Braised Moroccan-Style Chicken, Ragu Blognese, Osso Buco, Choucroute, Duck, Oyster & Artichoke Gumbo, Cioppino.

Just got back from the sold out New Pornographers show downtown. Okerville River (the opening band) alone was worth more than the price of admission. The Pornographers closed with a cover of “Don’t Bring me Down” by the Electric Light Orchestra, and “The Slow Descent into Alcoholism” (which is fantastic live). Neko Case and Kathryn Caller have the voices of angels (and Neko was even suffering from a cold). “The Bleeding Heart Show” brought tears to my eyes. Carl Newman’s vocals are hypnotizing. It’s probably for the best that they didn’t play “Electric Version”, because I’m sure I would have shouted something about playing Rockband in my boxers. That would have just been awkward.

My Weighted Companion Cube moved in last week. After showing it around town we took some photos together. Here, it’s debating whether or not to go sledding in the last snowfall of the year (fingers crossed!).

Sadly, in the end, it chickened out. We went to my office for a bit, and it decided to read while I was getting my work done. It seems to have a huge interest in momentum, heat, and mass transfer. For some reason, it keeps asking me about conservation of momentum.

I tried to explain the Cauchy momentum equation, but it’s been sooo long since I thought about that stuff. We did have a productive convo about the most efficient way to cool high-powered Disk Operating Systems running Genetic algorithms.

Later, I caught Weighted Companion Cube playing Portal.

I think it’s about to euthanize itself. This is so meta.

Finally, a rap that I can sing without guilt, given my afforementioned disposition.  Thanks Flight of the Conchords!

I had an MRI this morning (two MRIs, technically) to help my doctor figure out why I still get headaches as often, or as easily, as I do. I know the headaches originate in my upper back or neck, and some ergonomic fixes and physical therapy took care of a lot of them about a year ago. However, they still come a couple times a week, and often I wake up with them, or with the neck aches that lead to them, which is almost as bad a start to the day as when the cat is licking your face and telling you you missed the bus. The goal of the MRI was to see if there is anything structurally off that might be predisposing me to neck problems.

If you have never had an MRI, they are very loud, and can tend to be unpleasant, unless you like hearing the sound of a jackhammer right above your head while you’re strapped into a confined space and told to remain absolutely motionless for an hour and a half. The first one this morning wasn’t too bad. I think the repetitive nature of the ear-splitting noises actually put me into a sort of trance. During the second image, however, I started to have a sharp stinging pain at the back of my head, near where the ridge of my skull came in contact with the pad I was laying on. This pain got worse and worse throughout the exam, and a few times I considered calling the technician back in, but decided that would only prolong my discomfort and just toughed it out. I couldn’t ignore the pain, it just hurt too much, so I started trying to figure out what its source was. The best explanation I could think of involved me being secretly tagged with a micro RF transmitter by the shadow government so they could track me quickly, you know, in case I went rogue. That tag was being ripped through my cranial flesh by the powerful magnets in the MRI. If that infernal machine hadn’t been banging so loud I probably could have figured out exactly why they felt I was such a threat.

When I was finally wheeled out of the MRI, I asked the technician if that pain was normal, and she said it was not. We came to the conclusion that it was just due to putting pressure on a pointy part of my head for so long, but I think I like my origin story better.

I just got out of a job talk by Bungie; I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no, I did not win a free copy of Halo 3.

Generally, I’m looking for a new job starting sometime anywhere from 18-20 months from now. Tentatively, I’m going to go into academia in applied math or something along those lines. Realistically, I’m not a prime candidate for a position in a software or gaming company, because my training and experience are in a field that’s only tangentially related (it wouldn’t be impossible, but I assume it’s unusual). I just went to the talk for fun and to think outside of the standard job box a little.

The talk was fun. More technical than I expected. I never thought I’d hear the term “spherical harmonics” come up in a context where I was actually interested. Bungie sounds like a fun and creative place. When I asked if one of the three projects they’re working on now was called “Marathon”, they all looked at the floor. It’s not a “no”, and I’d like to interpret it as a “yes”, but in truth it’s probably just their default response when someone asks a question they aren’t allowed to answer. In all I learned a bit about what goes into making a game like Halo 3 look the way it does, and how some bits and pieces of the things I’ve learned at school are relevant outside of the bubble in which I apply them.

I was struck, however, when they showed a “life at Bungie” video, and only one female employee was shown in the whole company. The flick showed maybe 50 employees in their element (out of more than 200), and they were all guys. I’m sure Bungie is an equal opportunity employer, so I don’t fault them for this. It was just surprising from the perspective of someone in an engineering program with a high proportion of women (50/50 in the undergraduate part of my department). Looking around the job talk it seemed like 20-30% of the attendees were women, and I’m curious why the numbers I see here haven’t trickled down into a prominent company like Bungie. Perhaps after the Jade Raymond controversy, this shouldn’t be a surprise. After getting some press during promotion for Assassins Creed, Raymond was subjected to a myriad of disgusting attacks, and some of the coverage was just outright creepy. That story revealed a lot of prejudice in the gaming community, and perhaps yields a better perspective on the low gender ratio I noticed in the Bungie video than my sheltered University lifestyle.

I don’t really know anything about industry wide stats on this issue, so I’d welcome more information if anyone has it.

At sushi dinner Friday Night, one of my peers heard that some other students in the department had been up until 4AM playing Axis and Allies last night, and gratuitously rolled her eyes, adding “they may as well have been playing Dungeons and Dragons”. I gave some retort that I resented her remark, and that it was insensitive to say that a few days after Gary Gygax’s death (I was sort of joking). Of course, nobody at the table knew who Gygax was anyways [editorial update - one person at the table has informed me that they knew who Gygax was].

This launched a conversation about role playing games that somehow became a conversation about Second Life. I actually wasn’t the one to bring Second Life up, but I heard someone talking about a “game like The Sims where you can build a house and chat with other people”, so I jumped into the fray. Once I mentioned that I had a Second Life account and had used it, I had to field many, many questions about what it is, how it works, why people do it, and most strangely (to me), what it looks like, both in terms of what you see…

… and how the world is laid out geographically,

(This is just a small section of the Second Life world map).

Some of the other questions that came up, for example, were:

• Do you have to pay for it?
• What does it look like?
• What do people do on it?
• Who is connected? Does someone have to be connected for you to “play”?
• Can you have sex?
• If you have sex, what does it looks like? Is it pixelated?
• How do you travel around the world? Is it geographically like Earth?
• How do people make money from it?
• What if someone tries to have sex with you and you don’t want to?
• Are there political groups?
• Do you have to write code to use it?
• Who writes the sex code?
• How do you go from place to place?
• Are there countries?
• How do you know you’re not chatting with minors?
• If you pay for your account, do you get more sex?

A lot of these seemed to be inspired by things they had read or heard from short news stories, and I had to ask for clarification about a lot of the questions (pixelated sex? wtf?). Also, I don’t know why people were so interested in sex on Second Life (well, maybe I do know why), but I ended up telling my BDSM story. The discussion revealed some interesting aspects of how the people at the table viewed Second Life (and similar online activities - World of Warcraft came up a few times).

They really had no idea what a chat room with avatars would look like. The whole mechanic was foreign to them. Strange, for me, since that was sort of the “goal” of the internet as long as I can remember it. They were curious and very interested in seeing Second Life, but not so interested that they would try it themselves. Several times I was asked “could you show it to me?”, but there was a lot of resistance when I suggesting installing it on their computers (I wasn’t pushing for this by any means… I just suggested it because it made more sense). Some had a big stigma against adults playing pretend. They would ask, “why would you spend time doing this when you can do it in real life?” I tried to make a case for it being OK for adults to pretend too, and I think we came to the consensus that pretending is fine if it’s not adversely affecting other parts of your life. There was definitely a perception that sex and Second Life are equivalent. I gave some examples of other things that happen there (movies, lectures, arts, the Nature Publishing Group’s Second Life island, a.k.a. “Second Nature“, etc.), but in the end their perception might be somewhat true.

The most striking part of the conversation to me was the coupling of interest and disgust… There’s this other world of “stuff” to do, and they were fascinated with it, but the extreme distaste for actually being personally associated with it, coupled with the view that it’s a waste of time, feels odd. It reminds me of something from a Geekstudies post on a book by David Anderegg. Jason explains that part of Anderegg’s argument boils down to “[geek/nerd identity] is something kids mostly grow out of… before they go on to make tons of money”. Because Second Life is on the computer, I definetely got the sense that people felt they had “grown out” of trying something like that (never mind that Second Life is inappropriate for minors, let alone children). However, it’s nice to see that the press Second Life is getting is attracting people’s attention, and perhaps, interest.

I guess sometimes the best way to ask for something is to say nothing at all.

Today I went to our workplace cafeteria for lunch and ordered a tuna wrap on on an “orange” pita from one of the hair-netted wrap makers. She used an ice-cream scoop to shovel around 1/2 of a single scoop of tuna onto my wrap - we’re talking less than 1 oz of tuna fish.

When she asked me what else I wanted on the wrap, I just stared blankly at her, then the wrap, then her again. Then I shot her a vacant blink while mentally trying to poof up my eyelashes. She tried to counter with a “what are you talking about” look, but I wasn’t phased, and she folded and scooped a more reasonable amount of tuna into the wrap.