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Looks like I'm a minor hit. There was a post on MetaFilter about CSS art (basically, using a web browser to generate images in ways it was not designed to.) Turns out I had already done this a couple years ago. I quickly cleaned up my source code to ready it for release, and posted some sample images. You can view the sample page (takes a while to load, probably only works in IE), the original image, the PERL script, and the MetaFilter discussion. The guy who said "that's beautiful" is quite kind. Two hours ago I drank two liters of 100% juice, ate several pieces of bread and some cheese. Walking around the building a few minutes ago I felt so dizzy that I thought I would fall down. I went to the nurse's station (one of the perks of Rockwell Scientific.) My blood pressure is fine (diastolic a bit high), no sign of ear infection. So the nurse took my blood sugar level. 67. Two hours after a meal my blood sugar level should be between 110 and 170. 65 to 110 is the normal range for a fasting reading. I called my doctor. I'm waiting to hear back. More to come as it unfolds. OK, I just heard back. The verdict? Eat more protein, and more regularly. Seems a bit facile, but it's worth a shot. Beautiful portraits of Japanese mushrooms (I'm not kidding.) For a sampling of the different colors and geometries, check these links. It's really worth a look. (Thanks to MeFi for the link.) The Forbes Fictional Fifteen. So who's richer: Daddy Warbucks, Bruce Wayne, or J.R. Ewing? At the Apotex Centre, Jewish Home for the Aged in Toronto, the dental clinic has no gas for anaesthesia. When flu shots are offered, no one takes part. Residents are afraid to report pain and weakness to nurses. At night, flashlights are avoided by the staff, as are brisk walks in block-heeled shoes. Residents are frightened of showers and hide food in their rooms. Dining rooms and facilities are intentionally intimate and non-institutional. When one adult child of a resident asked a construction company to take down the barbed wire surrounding a lot across the street, they did. Half of the geriatric patients with dementia are Holocaust survivors. And without short term memory, their past becomes their present. Sixty years later, safe in a plush Canadian facility, the residents relive the Holocaust. I don't know how long it will stay up, but you can download Pearl Jam's new single "I Am Mine" from this site. Remember the mcgees.org post about the Masai who donated fourteen blessed cows to the United States after they heard of the 11 September terrorist attacks? How could Americans hope to repay such a touching gesture? American tourists Edward A. Lefrak and Don Hutchins might have done a bit: Hutchins flew one of the tribe's girls to the U.S., and Lefrak gave her a heart transplant. I went through the play-by-play of the final match of the 2000 National Scrabble Championship. That's a humbling experience. 48 distinct words were played, and I did not know 20 of them (42%). Also, three words I knew ('futz', 'garcon', 'garcons') but would have guessed not to be officially playable. What this means is that even if I had found locations for the words, I still would not have known to play nearly half of them. I have a pretty good vocabulary, but awee? didie? helot, oidia, and uta [1]? I'm inspired. I have to get Jenn to play with me later.
I have just brewed my last cup of my cherished Autumn Green tea. The leaves are all gone now. They have been stale for a while, and this last cup consisted almost exclusively of small leaf fragments. I'm tasting it now, and it is no longer the same. The magic is gone from it, there is almost no sweetness, it is a bit harsh and bitter. Teas are like wine, they are constantly evolving; but unlike wines, most teas just get progressively worse from the time they are first produced. This tea is one of my all-time favorites (though I'm a sucker for the notoriously unstable matcha [1].) Autumn Green is from the delicate Autumnal Flush, and while it is an oolong it is only lightly oxidized, leaving a lot of green character. It is delicious. However, the company from which I purchased it, the great In Pursuit of Tea, recently sent in their One Minute Tea Tip newsletter a head-to-head tasting of Autumn Green, which is in the Pouchong style, against the true Pouchong Ming Yue. The Autumn Green leaves were older, and so perhaps did not fare as well as they could have. Even allowing for this, though, the taste test overwhelming favored the Ming Yue in all categories, including color, aroma, palate, and suitability for multiple infusions. If I were more cynical I'd see this as merely a marketing ploy to get people to buy the Ming Yue, which is a steep $180 per pound versus $80 per pound for the Autumn Green. But I trust the guys who run the company, and I've spoken to them at length, so I trust their recommendations. My overall sense was that "if you liked the Autumn Green, you will love the Ming Yue." I'm considering whether to re-order the Autumn Green, of which they still have some sealed stock left over from last year, or to just order the Ming Yue. Considering their high recommendation, and my sentimental attachment to the Autumn Green, I might just do both. [1] Matcha, sometimes transliterated 'maccha', is the powdered, highly perishable green tea used in the Japanese cha no yu, or tea ceremony. For more information on Japanese tea varieties (including matcha but not including Autumn Green and Pouchong, which are from Taiwan), look here, and here, and here. The final setlist for Pearl Jam's 12 November release "Riot Act", courtesy of The [Official] Pearl Jam Rumor Pit.
With less than two months to go, I am as always getting into my pre-release hyperventilation stage. 15 songs! I hope that some are longer format and not of their recent sub-three minute pattern. Apparently the single "I Am Mine" is allowed to be played officially tomorrow, 18 September. The only problem with their traditional pre-release singles is that I listen to them so much that they never quite seem to fit into the album once released, as they have built an identy all their own. It happened with "Who You Are", it happened to "Given to Fly", it happened, to a certain degree, to "Nothing As It Seems". Regarding "Given To Fly", I am surprised when the song comes on every time I listen to Yield, which I admit is bizarre. This is great. Some wiseass was actually able to extract $3 from a Nigerian 419 scammer. He needed this money to prove they were acting in good faith. Go figure. More on manipulating 419 scammers here. On Monday The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer aired an interview with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. He was describing al-Qaida as a global menace and explained that the U.S. and its allies had just broken up a cell in Singapore. "Singapore," he said. "Singapore. That's around the other side of the world from the Middle East." Yo, Dick? 
(Map from National Geographic MapMachine) Many words have several different senses. When a language loses certain senses of the word, the language can be left with mis-interpreted phrases. Case in point: I was watching a television program the other day, in which the following exchange occurred: "Fancy meeting you here." The phrase fancy meeting you here obviously uses fancy as a synonym for imagine. But somehow the screenwriter lost sense of this definition, and somehow thought the common sentence was referring to the occasion being highly decorated or intricate; that is, the adjectival usage, new enough that it does not even appear in the 1889 Century Dictionary. You cannot very well imagine someone saying It's intricate to meet you here or How highly decorated to meet you here!, but this apparently did not give pause to the screenwriter. But I confess to perpetrating one of these myself, one which Geoff Nunberg calls attention to in his excellent book The Way We Talk Now. The phrase in question is polite society, which apparently employs an obsolete definition of polite meaning well-bred. And yet it my mind I have always pictured a society of people for which the entrance requirement is minding one's manners. Certainly this is a democratic and American read on the phrase, but one cannot easily alter one's progenitors; therefore polite society is one that the mass of us have no chance of entering. Fancy that. Rob is cool. Be sure to check out the other pages on the site, too. They're all cool. It's ... Lego Chef! I have been reading the September/October 2002 issue of the great Skeptical Inquirer magazine and have learned a very cool word. The word is syncretism, defined as "Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous." Very cool. Less cool is yet another SI demonstration of how stupid people are. This is one of those bang-your-head-into-concrete ones. I mean, we all know people are stupid, but fuck, people are stupid. I would give up my car and house and job and live in a fucking cardboard box if that could suddenly stop people from being this stupid. Try out Clifford Pickover's ESP Experiment and see if you come up with the same "explanations" the other visitors did after trying to fool the computer. Many visitors are convinced the computer is psychic (one was impressed that emotional excitation "does not even seem to interfere, as would be expected if one looks at Sufi literature.") One is convinced the computer scans eye movement and tracks pupul dilation resulting from concentration. Another is impressed that the English-language site can read his mind even though he thought of the card in Finnish. The duty of friends is not just to agree with everything, but to say, `We disagree on this point.' That is what I believe to be the duty of friends in relations between individuals, just as it is in relations between nations, if one happens to disagree. And on this point" -- Iraq -- "we disagree, or I disagree." Read a short but informative NYTimes article on German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's position regarding the U.S. and Iraq. (By the way, can you imagine a U.S. political leader giving a high-profile interview while smoking a cigar? How's that for a more laid-back culture?) |
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