December 16, 2007
moving shop
Much to my chagrin, I’ve started blogging again. But that’s only part of what makes me wince. It’s not just that I’m starting to spew my random thoughts all over the internets again, it’s that, in doing so, I also jumped ship from the anize.org team. The benefits: a site that accepts comments (at least until I’m hit with crazy spam bots) and full, easy customization from WordPress. The downside: leaving this community (as a writer but not as a reader).
If you want to keep up with the goings on in Baltimore, stop by the new site.
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February 13, 2007
influenza
Googled “influenza” to try and find out some scientific info for school. Ended up massively distracted by flu01.com.
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January 26, 2007
phishers of men
I didn’t realize that phishers hired out-of-work English majors. This is definitely the funniest spam I’ve ever seen.
(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
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January 02, 2007
"A romance in lower mathematics"
Ran across this cute 1960s animated short of a children’s book by Norton Juster (of Phantom Tollbooth fame and also a western Mass resident): “The Dot & the Line: a romance in lower mathematics”.
Seeing that it’s about love and math, how could I resist?
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February 13, 2006
Happy Valoween!
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February 11, 2006
fon
A compelling new service, this fon thing. Free (or low cost) wireless worldwide, a network of users who share, backing from Google and Skype (good overview here). I signed up but don’t have a compatible router to start yet (wrong linksys model!) but maybe the technical hurdles will be less once/if it catches on.
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?
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symmetry, snowflakes
Using The Self-Made Tapestry by Philip Ball as my resource, here are two possible answers to my question posed a few weeks back about how the arms of snowflakes manage to be symmetrical:
Hypothesis one: the symmetry existsImplausible 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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January 16, 2006
The Brick Testament
Someone has way too much free time on his hands.
The Brick Testament: a pictoral old testament in legos!
I love how there is actual sky the background…
(hat tip to BriBreakfastBlogger, the guy who taught me statistics last semester…)
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January 08, 2006
snow falling on Gore-Tex
New Year’s Eve Day found us on a ledge in western Massachusetts, overlooking Shelburne Falls and the Bridge of Flowers, catching snowflakes on our tongues. If you could have been one of the lucky snowflakes, drifting by yourself lazily down from the cold and muffled grey sky, I wager you would have tried to steer your way towards those four bundled figures, hovering closely to each other, admiring the miniature white lace decorating each others’ coats and fumbling with the large-fingered gloves to find the power button on the digital camera. For if you had found your way onto the Gore-Tex jet black or the soft brown velour or the green/blue Bugaboo, perhaps you would have had your shot at immortality. Forever frozen in still life and of digital storage, still unforgotten courtesy of the random photo screensaver.
Alas, the micro-nature photo inspirtation (thanks, gribley ) needed a magnifying glass, tripod, warm fingers, more patience, and some luck to materialize, so your snowflake incarnate would have been disappointed, for pictoral fame was not to be had (but blogdom fame—almost the equal!).
So damn if it wasn’t real nice then to just stop and admire these pristine little flakes, dropping out of the sky like you remember they did in second grade. But were these fine and individually falling flakes really unusual or was it our pace, the inhaled breath before ‘ought-six, the end-of-year pause and reflection, that made your fleeting flakes cling to every last ripstoppable fiber of my slippery black shell, or savor the velveteen folds before burrowing one of your six symmetric points and melting into the fur?
And then (oh no! attack of the nerds!) to find this passage in my routine reading two days later, describing the growth of the flake:But snowflakes are not so random: their alluring beauty lies in their six-pointed symmetry, which was first clearly identified by the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler in 1610. This hexagonal symmetry is imposed by the regular arrangement of water molecules in ice: a crystal lattice that picks out six “special” directions in space. New branches of crystalline ice sprout preferentially in these directions. In effect, the growth of the crystals is constrained by an underlying hexagonal grid, such that the geometric orderliness at the molecular scale becomes manifest as a regularity evident at the much larger scale of the whole snowflake. This interplay of chance and regularity in snowflake growth is a subtle affair whose details came to be understood only in the 1980s. -Philip Ball, Critical Mass (p. 116)So H-O-H dictates your six-pointed arrangement, but how does the symmetry remain consistent on each branch? How does a water molecule on one side of the flake know to copy one on the other side? Google could probably tell me, but the first mystery of 2006 can remain a childlike wonder for a while yet…
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September 02, 2005
eerie
Urgency drives the lost and found craigslist postings in New Orleans this week.
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June 26, 2005
think tanks working
Some survey of bloggers is being run by MIT, check it out…
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June 22, 2005
these are a few of my favorite things....
This sweet website was pointed out to me just a few days after the Baltimore housing search ended. We found a damn cute little rowhouse within biking distance from the Hopkins Medical campus (where the School of Public Health is located).
Maybe it’s better that I didn’t know about it sooner, as it appears that b.more is one of the few U.S. cities on craigslist that is not integrated into this system. But at this point I can marvel at it’s simple design (note how the frames fit nicely into the window no matter how you resize) and slick integration.
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March 31, 2005
let's ride
I just ran across the website of these two high school guys — brothers two years apart — who have been making music. I picked up their first album this summer when I was working with Josh at NUTC, but this website is a whole new level of their musical seriousness. I’m usually not a fan of this “lap-pop” stuff, so maybe it’s just because I know them (and the UMass library) that I dig this, but this one track had some lines that spoke to me. And the accompanying music video, despite tapping into that Napoleon Dynamite and Rushmore hipster image that I usually scorn, gave me the warm fuzzies.
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