the_entity's Journal

I'm Dreaming of a Whiiiiite Eeeeaster...
(Or, "Drip Drip Drop Little April Blizzard")

It is snowing here. In April. This is ridiculous.

I suppose they don't call it "The Great White North" for nothing...

Current Mood: headache

A gift

Awesome! Thanks, Synfony! (And also Mol and Synfony's dad, who helped with the wiring!)

(More pictures in Syn's commissions gallery here.) (It even glows in the dark! Although this is harder to photograph.)

--

I am currently in Ottawa, by the way. To those people who read LJ but I haven't seen in IRC yet: Hi!

Current Mood: working

The world is doomed, tralalalalala
NEWS: Crop circle symbolically codes first 10 digits of pi. Pretty impressive. Also, scientists create petrol-excreting bacteria. While an awesome achievement, this kind of thing puts a serious damper on hopes for a car-free world anytime soon.

YOUTUBE: Robot Chicken's take on Calvin & Hobbes. This probably counts as "raping your childhood", if you enjoyed C&H as a kid.

COMICS: Currently reading Art Spiegelman's Maus. It is... interesting. Highly disturbing. The whole retelling-the-Holocaust-with-talking-animals thing sounds like a very silly idea, but it works surprisingly well, to the point it's hard to imagine the comic being as good if it represented its characters as humans.

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN THE PERSONAL ADS: ( Germans: curious people. )

Current Mood: blank
Current Music: Shakira: Fijacion Oral vol. 1

Art
News on the grapevine is that

idan_cohen has a ponytail.

Clearly, this calls for continuation of Flax vs. !Caps: The Chronicles of Hair.

Part the 1st

( Part the 2nd )

What is going on in the world
JOBS: Have applied to a town in Canada called Edmonton. Upon informing my parents of this, I discovered that this is where my father was born. DESTINY

NEWS: Japanese woman lives in man's closet for a year (without man noticing, until he investigated the mysterious disappearance of food from his fridge). Police chief describes woman as "neat and clean".

SCIENCE!: A highly interesting article on generating big ideas, and the frequent occurrence of scientific ideas being discovered by multiple people simultaneously. Calculus is probably the best-known example of this, but apparently some researchers back in 1922 compiled a list of 148 major scientific discoveries that were independently discovered by multiple people - including the 4 different astronomers that discovered sunspots in 1611.

YOUTUBE: Soviet breakdance. (In Soviet Russia, dance breaks you! Well, it'd break me, if I tried pulling any of that.) (Original video here.) Also pleasing in my sight, although not scaling the same heights of Mount Awesome, are Sam Sparro's Black and Gold and Xavier Naidoo's Seelenheil videos.

Films the entity has seen
I have seen some movies in recent months. Some of them were good! All of them were in German, which generally doesn't matter too much, tho some movies lose something in translation. (And from what I've seen of the original version, the dialogue for Iron Man is actually slightly improved in German.)

( Street Kings of Bruges: No Country for Iron Men )

Also on the audiovisual front, I watched a TV show some nights back on German television. They decided to take some innocent young German reporter and make her take the (apparently quite strict) Italian driving test in Rome. It was quite entertaining, albeit an act of appalling cruelty to a driver more used to the orderly German traffic system. To her credit, however, she managed to make it through without bursting into tears or snapping like a twig at the irrational and insane behaviour of the Romans. She did fail the test, but that wasn't entirely surprising - partly for looking over her shoulder all the time (rather than using the mirrors), and partly due to a failure to properly anticipate and handle potentially dangerous situations arising from other road users. One wonders how anyone in Rome manages to pass, though...

Linkdump
DUDE WHERE'S MY JETPACK IT'S 2008 ALREADY: On the way, possibly: Rocket man flies on jet-powered wings.

Passing from free fall to a gentle glide, Rossy then triggered four jet turbines and accelerated to 186 miles an hour as a crowd on the mountaintop below gasped — then cheered...

Rossy then performed a stunt he had never before tried.

After one last wave to the crowd the rocket man tipped his wings, flipped onto his back and leveled out again, executing a perfect 360-degree roll that most birds would find impossible.

"That was to impress the girls," he later admitted.

A further datapoint in favour of Scott Adams' contention that most major scientific advancements have come about due to men's need to impress the ladies! (A theory which also handily explains why the Middle Ages didn't have a scientific revolution despite the Scholastics' interest in science and development of scientific method - their intellectual heavyweights were mostly under vows of celibacy...)

LAUGH OR CRY?: Aussie straps in beer, not child. I'm both amused and appalled at this:

A car driver in Australia has been fined for strapping down his beer rather than his young child.

Police said they were "shocked and appalled" when they pulled over the car south of Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory.

They said the 30-can pack of beer was strapped down between two adults in the back, with the five-year-old child unrestrained on the floor.

BELATEDLY: Over at Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, a touching lament for the author's departed friend, Sir William Thatcher, sometime ycleped Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein.

Proud Deth, yower trophie is our hevinesse,
Your heraud may ful loude yel and crie,
For thou hast slayn the flour of hardinesse:
Sir Ulrich knewe the herte of chivalrie
And evir daunce he coud to melodye;
A silent yere he spent oones in a toun
In Itaylye to understonde a roun.

(Old news, this last, but I only just noticed it now. Heath Ledger, RIP.)

Misc.
GENERAL STATUS: Busy. There's one or two people I know I have to get back to on certain stuff; I'll try to be in IRC tomorrow.

JOBS: My application for a job in quantum optics fell through because it got eaten by a spam filter and I didn't find out until it was too late, woe. Of the job in Norway, I have no further news. I have applied for a job in Canada which may involve studying superfluid nanodroplets, and am pretty optimistic about that. (Also, have short-term job doing calculations for one of the professors here, woo.)

MANGA: recent volumes of Tsubasa are highly confusing, as two almost-identical characters, one of whom is being intermittently mind-controlled by the other, finally meet and strange things happen. However, it is also pretty awesome. I've commented before that Sakura is, oddly, much more interesting and likeable in an amnesiac, brain-damaged state than in Card Captor Sakura; it appears CLAMP are also extending the "grab readers' interest by hideously damaging the character" approach to Shaolan, and, well, it works.

Also, xxxHolic #12 = awesome. The scene in which we finally get to know what's going on with Himawari-chan? Especially awesome.

COMICS: Fables and Jack of Fables continue to be good. Ghost Rider, which I've been continuing to get mostly on inertia, has suddenly livened up a lot, with a new creative team who are clearly having lots and lots of fun. "Next issue: Death Race on Ghost Cannibal Highway -or- Cycle Nurses KILL! KILL! KILL!"

YOUTUBE: Wolf at the Door by Radiohead; an unofficial video, but a pretty good one.

NEWS: Entrepreneurial children respond to school attempts to enforce healthy eating by setting up black markets in sweets and hamburgers: "It has happened to us. Kids with motorbikes buying McDonald’s burgers in bulk and flogging them in the playground. We are a business and enterprise school in Essex so I guess I should not be surprised," one [headmaster] said. "When challenged, the boy at the centre said he was just being enterprising."

H'mmm.
Statistical probability dictates: the you [insert name here] that can exist here has a finite probability of existence in other galaxies, superclusters, etc.; and thus, if the universe is infinite, then the matter of whether other duplicates of you, sitting in the exact same chair, thinking the exact same thoughts, reading the exact same livejournal entry, exist, is not one of whether such duplicates exist, but of how many googleplexes of light-years stand between you and the next instance of such a (statistically improbable) duplicate of yourself .

If you are drugged, drunk, confronting a difficult decision: somewhere, someone, bearing your name and indistinguishable (by any means known to science) from you faces the same problem (given an infinite universe, probability dictates it). Furthermore, given that your existence is physically possible, therefore, in an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of duplicates of you facing the exact same problem. If you screw up: there are versions of you doing better; if not, good going.

Let us consider the matter from a totally different angle:

There were kings, upon a time, who lavished upon a beloved entire castles, estates, buildings of the largest possible expense availible to them. Considering that, consider also what that one might think of you who has spent an infinity of stars and superclusters merely to decorate your night sky.

Argh.
So, spending waaay too much time browsing the TV Tropes wiki. I mention this chiefly as it's where I found the link to this fascinating article on the 5 most horrifying bugs in the world. Unsurprisingly, the list consists entirely of insects from orders hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants, hornets, ichneumons - the order has a monopoly among insects on painful stings) and diptera ("true flies", i.e. the 2-winged type - mostly vermin). (Both the Schmidt and the Starr insect sting pain scales are defined as concerning themselves only with hymenopterans, given the lack of other insects worthy of consideration in the matter.)

What the article doesn't mention, with regards to the japanese giant hornet (scary because: 2 inches long and its flesh-dissolving venom contains a pheromone that summons other giant hornets to come and sting you too), is that its larvae are also a local delicacy in some japanese mountain villages; or that its demolition of bee-hives is only that easy when preying on european honey-bee hives (which, for some reason, the japanese have lots of) - the european bees tend to engage in the bizarre "one-at-a-time" attack strategy beloved of goons in martial arts movies (you can see this in the video in the article). The japanese honey bees, on the other hand, have developed an incredibly ingenious collective defence against wandering hornets. (Picture of same, from wikipedia.)

Curiously, the japanese hornet's sting isn't mentioned in either the Schmidt or Starr sting pain indices (a lack of thoroughness which I can hardly bring myself to condemn), but Tokyo entomologist Masato Ono has helpfully filled the gap, by describing the sensation as being "like a hot nail through my leg".

So, off to bed. I'll have good dreams tonight, I'm sure...

'tis again the cruellest month; lilacs &c
NEWS: New Zealand man in court for using a hedgehog as a weapon.

Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy.

"It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks," said Senior Sgt Bruce Jenkins, in the North Island town of Whakatane.

It was unclear whether the hedgehog was still alive when it was thrown, though it was dead when collected as evidence.

The police spokesman said the suspect was arrested "for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog."

YOUTUBE: The Killers: Read My Mind is pure excellence. As is this mockery/barbed lionisation of Richard Dawkins, worth watching for dancin' Charlie Darwin alone (1:12 & 3:45 into the video - man that is one groovy scientific pioneer). There's also a new Ich + Ich video out, which I'm ambivalent on; maybe it'll grow on me tho.

LIT CRIT: A long-overdue analysis of Lord of the Rings from a property law perspective. An important issue in considering the morality of LoTR, methinks - if Sauron's claim to the Ring is valid, then Frodo commits theft and vandalism in the name of saving the world (and Sauron is, after all, only trying to get his property back), raising issues of how far the ends justify the means.

(One of the factors discussed is the way the Ring attempts to find its way back to Sauron, but I feel this should have no legal or moral relevance, and should be taken into account only as a practical matter in deciding how to dispose of the Ring. If the homing instinct of a magical artifact were to be given legal weight, that would preclude any transfer of ownership, and create problems in cases where ownership was believed to be transferred; and there being a potential continuum of homing-instinct strength in such artifacts, where does one draw the line, in any case?)

More art
One's a trigger-happy FLEET marine with a plasma cannon! The other's a mammoth who ate the marine's brain, crawled inside his head and controls him like a zombie! Together, they fight crime!

Based on IRC weirdness, naturally. (There is also ficcage of the event: go see!)

(Also, it was snowing again today. Blimey.)

I'm dreaming of a white... Easter...
It snowed this morning. About 2 cm of snow. More on the way, apparently.

Happy Easter!

All quiet on this front.
MUSIC: Xavier Naidoo & someone else I've never heard of have a new single out, Sehnsucht, and it's pretty good. Youtube browsing has also turned up a video of Loreena McKennitt's excellent song Mummer's Dance. W00tage.

ART: Have been trying out coloured pencils some more. I like working in colour, tho alas it doesn't scan as well as monochrome.

( Snip for image )

Current Music: See post.

Hurm.
WOE: Still between jobs, alas.

W00T: Leonard Cohen is touring the US, UK & Europe later this year, for the first time in over a decade (which I learnt from a highly attractive young lady who wants me to accompany her when he stops off in Germany).

IN CONCLUSION: On balance, life is good. (Not that I wouldn't like it to get even better...)

--

I am currently reading the essays of Hakim Bey, and may comment on them in future. (Or, may not. While highly interesting, anarchist theory is not something I can really make informed comment on.) (Although I would like some explanation of this highly curious remark: If we took all the energy the Leftists put into "demos", and all the energy the Libertarians put into playing futile little 3rd-party games, and if we redirected all that power into the construction of a real underground economy, we would already have accomplished "the Revolution" long ago - why would libertarian types want to undermine capitalism, and why would left-wingers want to undermine the State? Who would provide universal health care or welfare-state services once you've destroyed The System?)

Misc. ("an' lor' bless me, it dinosaurs!")
NEWS: BIIIIG FROG

COMICS: I have finally gotten into Megatokyo, and am enjoying it massively.

SCIENCE!: "...The same bands were later observed by Evans, using the technique of intensification by added oxygen. Evans boldly put 50 atm. of ethylene in a cell with 25 atm. of oxygen. The apparatus subsequently blew up, but luckily not before he obtained the spectra shown in Figure 8." (AJ Merer & RS Mulliken, Chem. Rev. 69, 645 (1969)) (PDF)

SPAM O' THE DAY: "...and poirot deduced at once that the great creatures rushed away in all directions inside the periwinkleblue norman gale thought: and run it over with beaten butter... i returning from some small jollification and was was to say petulantly, i wish jasper and mamma the indictment was quashed, and wilson fled, satisfied the walls of which were gaily coloured, bright masonry about the cavate lodges, and that is rude of her dress, and illness had made them shrink mistress davies sung it, an' lor' bless me, it dinosaurs, the most terrible beasts which have."

Programming course
So, I'm attending lectures on Fortran programming, which are fun. The guy giving them talks slowly and meanders somewhat, but is extremely knowledgeable. Today, we learnt about several useful implicit functions and how a dot instead of a comma in the wrong place once lost the US Govt a satellite.

Our teacher is also something of a heretic, as he taught us how to use a GOTO statement without evincing any sense of shame. However, we have yet to be eaten by velociraptors, so it's all good.

Also, I finally have a paypal account, woo. Given that I have slightly more time than previously and could probably use the money, I'll be open to artistic commissions (including comics, tho those are lots more work than they look) until I get me a new position, which'll probably be in a month or three.

EDIT: Also, recent art! With apologies to Piro, I present:

( Sad Dave in Snow )

Job news woo/woe
So, I have now made the acquaintance of Scandinavian academia's way of handling job applications: whereas some places simply get back to you with a "yes" or "no", leaving you in the dark about why, the Scandinavian system is to e-mail all the applicants a list of how they rate each of the applicants. This makes for nerve-wracking reading. I now have a report in my inbox, telling me which applications were disqualified (and why) and describing me as "qualified", and (alas) several other people as "well-qualified". It also gives two shortlists of suitable candidates, one for each of the two main criteria, on the second of which I managed to scrape a low position. It doesn't, however, tell us who's got the jobs yet...

Anyway. How is everyone?

(Also, I saw a badger today! Unfortunately it was dead.)

Back!
And Christmas is over, and what did you do?
Watched lots of telly and ate lots of food...

...there was once an excellent Spitting Image version of And So This is Christmas along those lines which I was going to link here, but I can't find it on youtube. Ho hum.

To make up for this, other stuff found when youtube-browsing, mostly music videos:

( Read more... )

Anyhow. I spent 2 weeks in England, had lots of fun, came back with a large stack of books (including the next 4 books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, woo). Slight cold, lots to do, work begins on monday so I'll spend the rest of the weekend getting in as much relaxation & laziness as possible. Happy new year, folks.

Year's End
So, the holidays are nigh; my flight's on Sunday and internet access is patchy thereafter. Not that this'll make much difference, given that I've been too busy to update or read F-list for a long while... Still lots to do today, though - packing, shopping and helping someone move house. Maybe getting a haircut, to boot.

And before I go: courtesy of myself, Spark and Synfony: some seasonal art.

( Iiiiii'm Dreaming of a Fleeeeeeet Christmas )

Anyway. Happy Christmas, peeps, have a good new year, and travel safe wherever you're going.

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