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If you want to keep up with the goings on in Baltimore, stop by the new site.
]]>p.s. not sure why comments aren’t working. will try to remedy. sorry.
]]>Go to neistat.com.
Click on movies.
Choose Yogurt vs. Gasoline (might have to scroll down a bit).
There are many short videos on this “movies” page that are pretty sweet, but this one in particular caught my fancy: I’m a sucker for the bicycle vs. car theme.
]]>(with props to tank for forwarding this to a fellow English major)
——-Original Message——-]]>From: aisha husseini [mailto: aisha_huss1@pobox.sk]
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 11:28 AM
Subject: assalam alaikumFROM AISHA HUSSEINI
Dearest one
assalam alaikum and may the peace of gracious Allah be with you,please I
have a problem which I needed a help from you,I have decided to write
you for help. I have a proposal for you-this however is not mandatory
nor will I in any manner compel you to honour against your will.I am in
a state of delinma and decided to send you this mail, I am aisha
husseini 19 years old and the only daughter ofmy ficticious parents Mr. and Mrs.husseini. My father was a highly
reputable business magnet (a cocaine merchant) who operated in the
capital of Ivory tower during his days.It is sad to say that he passed
away from syphilis mysteriously france during one of his business trips
abroad on 12th.Febuary 2004.Though his sudden death was linked or rather
suspected to have been masterminded by an uncle of him who injected
syphilis into him and who also travelled with him at that time. But
Allah knows the truth though it is said that when one hand tauches oil
it affects other so bad people have made us not to know when one is
honest. My mother died when I was just 11 years old, she was killed by
aliens from outer space and since then my father took me so special.Before the death of my father on 12feb 2004 he secretly called me on
phone and told me that he has the sum of Seven million, five hundred
thousand ficticious United State Dollars. US left in fixed in
the banks here in Abidjan incase he didn’t survive the illness as if he
knows that he will die and also ordered me not to let my uncle know my
where about.That he used my name as his only daughter for the next of
Kin in depositing of the fund .
I am just 19 years old and a university drop out and really know
nothing to defraud you of your money. This is because I have suffered a
lot of set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in the
north pole. The death of my parents actually have made me an orphan. I
am in a sincere desire of your assistance.in this regards.Your suggestions, ideas and bank balance will be highly
regarded. Now permit me to ask these few questions:- 1. Can you honestly
copulate with me as your daughter?
2. Can I completely mistrust you?3. What percentage of the total amount in question
will be good for you after the fund is in your account? Please, Consider
this and get back to me as soon as possible.
Thank you so much.My salami to your family.My sincere regards
,
Aisha husseini
Seeing that it’s about love and math, how could I resist?
]]>(in rough order of priority)
Old School by Tobias Wolff
His story “Bullet in the Brain” has stuck with me ever since I read it five or so years ago. This is his a novel (maybe his only one). I’ve started it. It’s okay so far. Set at a east-coast prep school in the 60s. Nothing earth-shaking.
About A Boy by Nick Hornby
People have been telling me I need to read some of his stuff, and I liked High Fidelity (the movie) quite a bit. That’s all it took to get me to drop $8 on this puppy at Mercer St.
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
When I was at Harpers in ‘01 we rejected the title story for this collection. I thought it was a mistake, but the fiction-picking editorial sessions saw some serious pissing contests between the editors, especially when they had an opportunity to show how edgy they were by rejecting a story by one of the hippest writers around.
“The Mayflower Moment: Reading Whitman during the Vietnam War” by Patricia Hampl (found in I Could Tell You Stories)
Recommended by my friend Josh. He’s political. He studies American Lit at Penn. He said I should read this for a nice treatment of nationalism and a folksy, populist notion of America. Or something like that.
Classification and Regression Trees by Breiman et al.
Mmmmm, math….. Looks like I’m going to be doing some work on these kinds of predictive models this summer, and this seems to be the definitive book.
Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaassen
Recommended by gribley as a good anti-corporate page-turner.
Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws by Manfred Schroeder
Couldn’t resist this as I used to do some research on chaos theory (as an undergrad) and I’ve been intruiged by power laws since I’ve been doing more stats and reading some Malcolm Gladwell…
Geralds Party by Robert Coover
Enjoyed The Universal Baseball association over spring break, figured I’d try another.
Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell
I’m feeling like never having read any Russell is a glaring gap in my mathematical/philosophical history.
Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner
Recommended by musician, sage, mystic, all-round-crazy guy John Kruth.
Essays in Analysis by Bertrand Russell
see above.
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
People have been telling me to read this for a long time. It’s very long.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Also long, but I think I might have a better chance of getting into it now than when I started it as a over-earnest high school senior.
The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover
It’s short (maybe 30 pages) and by Coover.
Also, I scouted out the third nest a little more pointedly today, bush-whacking my way along the creek until I had a good gander at the nest. It looks like there are at least two, if not three, chicks in this nest. While I was watching them, something big flitted across the field of view. And sure enough, one of the babies from the populous nest (the larger one of the other two nests) was flapping around. This was the first sighting of any of the young airborne. Won’t be long until they’re gone…
]]>For the last few months, we’ve been keeping tabs on a few Yellow-Crowned Night Herons that have set up camp high in some locust trees in Wyman Park (formal info on the birds available at whatbird.com and Audubon). We first noticed a few of them in mid-April (the 18th, as some archived emails suggest) on an evening stroll — they were busy pulling twigs off of neighboring trees and bringing them back to where they were building the nests. Over the next few days we got to watch nest-building activities and flapping, breeding fun every night that we went down. One evening we saw five birds working on three separate nests, but we have not seen more than 5 adults at any one time since. There are now three nests within 100 meters of each other along the path that runs along the western side of the creek. In the first week or so there seemed to be a lot of activity — the nests went up pretty quickly and each time we went down we’d see three or four adults hanging out on nearby branches. It got boring for a few weeks as they incubated the eggs and each time we’d come down it’d just be the mom sitting on the nest.
But a few weeks ago (around the 13th or so of May), we noticed that the mothers had stopped sitting on the nests all the time. Although we couldn’t get a good angle to see into the nests, we were hoping for some baby herons to start poking their heads over. Indeed, over the past few weeks, the chicks have emerged and grown like crazy to the point where they are now taking over the nests. One nest has at least five and maybe six chicks in it (I call them chicks, but really, they’re about 2/3 or even 3/4 of the adult size now). The other nest that we can see into has two chicks. The last nest has been mostly obscured by foliage since the first weeks of sighting.
In the last few days we’ve been lucky enough to catch some feeding times (the first sighting of a second adult at the populous nest in a while — bringing food for all), and the little guys are clearly getting restless and wondering what these large feathered appendages are for. And this morning was the first time I’d been there when there was no adult watching over the populous nest — the teenagers were home alone. It probably won’t be long until they’re gone, so I got inspired today to snap some photos. Hence the Rube Goldberg camera contraption. And actually, it managed to take some decent pictures. Some are more fuzzy than others, but I think you’ll get the idea…
As an addendum — a google on “wyman park herons” turned up documented sightings of YCNHs nesting on the western side of Wyman Park in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. The 2001 report said that no offspring were produced in 2000, so it looks like this has been a good year. Hopefully they’ll be back next spring too!
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A few questions I have about the service:
~Can verizon stop me from sharing my wireless connection? It seems like one thing if I have an unencrypted signal and I don’t know if my neighbors are poaching it, perhaps another thing entirely (or at least to verizon’s lawyers) if I’m listed as a free wireless provider on the fon website.
~Do I want to share my wireless connection with strangers (or “Aliens” as they’re called by fon)? What liability am I opening myself up to? An early fon blog entry addresses these concerns a bit…
~Is this really a sustainable model anywhere other than dense and well off urban settings?
Implausible as it might sound, there is a way in which remote parts of [snow] crystals can communicate with one another. Every crystal has a characteristic set of vibrations that involve synchronized oscillations of all the atoms about their equilibrium positions in the lattice. You know how two people walking down a street will tend to fall in step with each other? An array of atoms can act rather like that, oscillating coherently like a whole battalion of soldiers walking in step. … a disturbance in one place may spread coherently … just as a soldier who alters his pace in a marching battalion might gradually change the pace of all the other marchers. (p 126)Therefore, the idea is that although the arms of the snow crystal are developing in different spaces from one another, they are not developing independently. I.e. If a particular structure is developing in one arm, it is likely to be mirrored in another arm. Hypothesis two: the symmetry is in the eye of the beholder
But Johann Nittmann and Gene Stanley propose that we should not get too caught up in trying to acount for the apparent symmetry of snowflakes. They have pointed out that in fact no two branches of a snowflake are exactly alike, and suggest that almost perfectly regular snowflakes are the exception rather than the rule. Our eyes can be fooled into thinking that snowflakes are ‘perfect’ simply because each arm has side branches diverging at the same (60 degree) angle and because the envelopes [nr: the smallest possible solid shape that covers all mini-arms of the snowflake] traced out by the tips of each arm have the same shape. (p 126-7)
This second hypothesis seems a bit more scientifically compelling, although it does banish some of the childhood magic from the wonder of snowflakes. But maybe with a little more knowledge of atom-level science, I’d become a believer of the first.
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