Mambo Taxi

The last week has seen me:

* startle Neil Stephenson [1]
* have an annoying contact lens incident [2]
* apply the necessary teachable-moment to a kid outside my workplace who was messing around with my bike when I left the office
* meet Stewart Brand
* watch a superconducting toy train, a sort-of real quantum computer and a really pretty 3-d movie which was narrated by Stephen Hawking [3]
* document the activities of the zombies at City Hall. Well, the zombies attracted to City Hall by a certain video. This was surprisingly fun.
* play with a working reprap, a supposedly self-replicating machine. [4]
* be part of creating and solving various problems; technical, social; problems of planning and problems of execution. Be pleased with some outcomes. Be exhausted at work, but not too exhausted.
* see melted_snowball off on his trip to Japan. Missing him a lot.
* not get enough sleep. Not get the rounds of bugs that are sweeping my workplace. Now if I can just get my flu shots before I have any flu symptoms, I'll be even happier.
* feel simultaneously lonely and not like talking to people. Sometimes I wish I were wired to be more social.
* spending quality time with Rover.

[1] I saw Neil Stephenson speak twice last week; afterwards, I thanked him for providing fun role-models for geeky people everywhere. I offered that I was occasionally inspired by Sangemon, the "hero" of Zodiac, whose style of bicycling in Boston traffic was over-the-top assertive. Neil looked a bit nervous at this- "I hope you do that safely." I laughed. Anyway, he was very polite.

[2] on second thought, I won't describe it. Not fun. [5]

[3] The toy train zoomed around a magnetic track. The "train" contained a super-chilled magnet and it was propelled by a shove from the demo-guy. The "quantum computer" was very poorly explained by a volunteer docent but it had an oscilloscope readout with a squiggle. And a plexiglass and metal assembly. Sorry, but that's all I got. I found my favourite part of the video, animated by NCSA - flying from the western spiral arm to the center of our galaxy. This was the most effective use of 3D I've yet seen.

[4] This evening I went off to the local nascent "hack lab" (clubhouse for tinkerers, more or less). I brought my arduino and stepper-motor. But I spent a lot of the time there socializing, playing with other peoples' toys [6], and such. It's a cool space, and my life isn't compatible with spending much time there, but I'm glad to see it exists.

[5] but my optometrist's office is 5 minutes walk from my office; and they gave me a new lens to replace the one that was stuck in my eye. Oops, I wasn't going to describe it. Well there you go.

[6] the reprap was a surprise to see in person- by the end of the evening, it was working, and it did "print" a plastic part used to make itself. Re-reading reprap.org, I had forgotten they only produce 60% of their own parts- yes it's a toy, but it's a fairly cool toy.

I'm missing some stuff in this update, but that's what I get for not posting frequently enough.

I found myself wandering The Prospect of Whitby, the co-op house I lived in at Cornell. The house president was missing, which felt fairly ominous. I walked up the stairs, admiring the brand new 4th and 5th floors (which somehow hadn't changed the exterior profile of the house). There was lots of open space and I marveled at how much larger it looked from the inside.

I wandered into this guy's room, which was very tastefully painted in light shades, with a big glass table and a panorama mac monitor. We started chatting about what Cornell classes were like these days, and how odd it was about the the house president. I admired a rather incongruous-looking full-size animal costume sitting on a chair. He said, "Oh, we've all got them now."

Then Doctor Who walked in. "There you are," he said. "Something's not right here." He was followed in by another Whitby, a woman wearing a mouse-suit, the head under her arm. She was distraught; she felt somehow responsible for the president's disappearance. The Doctor looked at the pair of them and cheerfully asked what was the story with the fur suits? The woman showed off how they were made, partly from big stuffed animals they decapitated and re-stitched. It started feeling a bit gruesome, how intently they were into the dismemberment of these stuffed animals.

I had a mental leap that left an awful feeling in my stomach- we were in great danger if she put on the head; these poor students were being symbiotically controlled. For murder.

And then I woke up.

It amuses me to no end that I can trace most of the elements of this dream. The decapitation bit is probably trying to make some sense of the BC Greyhound bus murder that's been in the news. The Whitby stuff is because I was connecting with old friends on facebook yesterday. The Doctor Who bit is- well, a very convenient plot framework to make everything fit together, because my dreams like to do that. ...The only part I'm not sure of is the homicidal fur suits.

Natural selection is so cool. The Dec. 24 issue of the Economist has a neat article about humans' shift from hunting to agriculture; how it was in a sense a desperation move as they hunted the big game to extinction. Such as the rhinoceroses in France. 30,000 years ago. That's... amazingly recent. When they ran out of rhinos, they went on to elk and bison. When they ran out of bison, agriculture seemed like a good idea. OK, I'm bastardizing the story a bit, but it makes a fun story that way. I'd link to the article, but the Economist didn't put it on their website.

On Thursday, the_infamous_j showed me Gankutsuou. It's a sci-fi anime in 24 episodes retelling The Count of Monte Christo. After watching two episodes and reading up in Wikipedia, I want to read the (English translation of the) original. I may come back and watch the anime- it's got a different perspective, starting the story with the young aristocrat Albert and his friend Franz, piecing together the Count's story in flashback in a much less sympathetic fashion. Other interesting bits I learned from yon wonderful time-sucker wikipedia: two other stories whose plots were heavily borrowed from CoMC: Sweeney Todd (which I know some of you liked) and Stars My Destination (by one of my favourite old sci-fi authors, Alfred Bester).

Thirdly, from epi_lj: The Complete New Yorker on DVD has dropped in price from $100 to $39.99. That's cool enough- $40 is a very fair price- but if you order with coupon-code 'WINTER25' it's $29.99. Wow. I'm going to buy a copy for my parents; perhaps then they will throw out the great big stacks of the magazines in their house?... Yeah, it's unlikely, but I suppose I can hope. ;)

And now maybe my brain will quiet down a bit and let me get to sleep; though I won't complain, because the evening was pretty great. Not the least of which: for dinner d. made duck burritos and lemon bars. Yum!

I read PKD's original book of Scanner Darkly last year, and on the basis of that, decided to skip the movie.

When I was visiting my folks, my brothers brought along the movie, and I let myself get sucked into watching.
The movie's much better, I think. You can argue whether "Bladerunner" is better than "Do Androids Dream" but I see no real comparison here. PKD's novel had distracting 60s slang and the drug/police cultures felt unrealistic and flat. All of these seem fixed by translating to rotoscope animation and limiting to 100 minutes. The visuals work better than the descriptions. Even though the scramble-suit is a bit silly.

On my lunch hour, I:

- made a physio appointment in the student centre 100m from my office. For this afternoon. This seems speedy, considering that I made a doctor's appointment less than 48 hours ago, and saw the doc yesterday. What's the catch? :)
- got sushi
- didn't buy a tasty-looking pint of local strawberries from the campus farmer's market because the line was waaaay too long.
- discovered I should've read the Bulletin earlier this week, as William Gibson had a reading here last night. *shrug*
- filled my prescription for a Salbutamol inhaler
- learned that my staff health insurance is confusing to a pharmacist who hears "staff" and processes as "new student." So I have paperworks for to submit now please to Manitoba.

...I'd say it was a grueling hour, but that would be a lie because it was under one roof and actually quite speedy.