More pictures:
Friday, January 30, 2009
ooh! i want one!
Here is an animal I learned about from my morning crossword:
Lovely Sally, by Only Alice It is an axolotl, a type of Mexican salamander commonly used in research because of its ability to regrow limbs. It is also remarkable in that it exhibits neoteny -- instead of metamorphosing from larva to adult, it spends its whole life in larval form. I guess that is why it is so cutesy-wutesy :).
Thursday, January 29, 2009
game-theory and evolution
In my lab meeting yesterday, my adviser gave a talk on the philosophy of learning vs. hard-coded action sequences in animals. As evidence that many animals respond in predictable, unadapting (in the life of a single organism) ways to various stimuli, he gave a bunch of examples of a parasite evolving to take advantage of another animal's evolved, hard-coded reactions to various stimuli. Here are some of the examples I remember:
Stuff to read:
- Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps. The wasp lays eggs in the caterpillar. The larvae feed off of the caterpillar. When fully developed, they eat through the caterpillar, and attach themselves to a branch nearby to cocoon. The caterpillar is still alive and under the wasps' spell, and stands guard over the wasp cocoons, scaring off potential predators. See the video:
[[Embedded YouTube video Zombie caterpillar controlled by voodoo wasps]] - Wasp performs roach-brain-surgery to make zombie slave-roaches. The wasp would like to bring the much larger cockroach to its nest, implant its eggs, and let its young feed off the cockroach until they are mature. The cockroach is large enough that the wasp cannot fly it back to its nest. It stings the cockroach, temporarily paralyzing it. It injects another venom, which allows it to control the roach. The wasp then guides the walking roach to its nest. See the video:
[[Embedded YouTube Video Zombie cockroaches revived by brain shot - Parasite's web of death. From the BBC: "The larva of the wasp Hymenopimecis sp. will suck on the "blood" of the spider and eventually eat it - but not before it has injected a behaviour-bending chemical that makes the spider construct a special scaffold. Only this design, which is quite different from the spider's normal fly-trap, has the strength to support the pupating wasp."
From "Spider drugged by parasitic wasp", News in Science - Gordian worm. The Gordian worm can only survive in water, but its larvae are parasites to crickets and other arthropods. When the larvae are mature, they manipulate their host to jump into the water, which kills the host and the worm wiggles out. Watch the video:
[[Embedded YouTube Video: A Worm Coming Out of a Cricket]] - Koi can mimic the appearance of the open mouth of a bird's young, and trick the bird into feeding it. I can't find this online, other than reports of a swan at a Chinese zoo feeding koi:
from Swan feeds fish at zoo, Ananova - Brood parasitism. Related to this is parent organisms that trick another animal into raising their young as their own, for instance cuckoos and cowbirds will add their eggs to other birds' nests.
"A Common Cuckoo being raised by a Reed Warbler", Wikipedia - Parasitic crustacean replaces fish's tongue. The Cymothoa exigua attaches itself to the tongue of the spotted rose snapper, extracts blood and grows. With time, the fish's tongue atrophies, and the crustacean replaces the fish's tongue -- that is, it can be used by the fish just like a regular tongue. They continue feeding on the fish's blood, or on fish mucus.
From Enomogia 
From Tongue-Eating Fish Found in Bug, BBC 
From "Fish Tongue-Eating Parasite Spreading?", Animal Planet - Plants brainwashing animals. From Wikipedia: "Cordyceps unilateralis is a species of entomopathogenic fungus that infects and alters the behavior of ants in order to ensure the widespread distribution of its spores. The spores enter the body of the insect through its spiracles, where they begin to consume the non-vital soft tissues. When the fungus is ready to spore, its mycelia enter the ant's brain and change how it perceives pheromones, causing the insect to climb to the top of a plant and use its mandibles to secure itself to the stem. The fungus then kills the ant, and the fruiting bodies of C. unilateralis grow from its head and explode, releasing the spores. This process takes 4 to 10 days. The species produces red naphthoquinones that possesses anti-malarial activity."
[[Embedded YouTube Video: Cordyceps Fungus]]
Stuff to read:
Sunday, January 25, 2009
this is what a zither is
In case you were wondering what a zither is (and whether an instrument with 30+ strings was a sither and whether to offer advice at the card table was to kibitz or to kibits [xword], it is that instrument played in "The Third Man" theme music, and shown in the intro to the movie:
[[Embedded YouTube Video Anton Karas Zither]]
You know what G.I. Joe would say. Well, I know. "Now we know, and knowing is half the battle!"
By the way, Kyle tells me that there was no actual character named G.I. Joe in the cartoon, just characters with more in-your-face names like Sgt. Slaughter, Cobra Commander, and Snow Job (? Apparently, he's the original "arctic trooper").
You know what G.I. Joe would say. Well, I know. "Now we know, and knowing is half the battle!"
By the way, Kyle tells me that there was no actual character named G.I. Joe in the cartoon, just characters with more in-your-face names like Sgt. Slaughter, Cobra Commander, and Snow Job (? Apparently, he's the original "arctic trooper").
Ooh! There is rain and thunder outside right now!
local news really sucks
or What Did We Do Before We Had High-Speed Internet?
Our internet was out yesterday and part of today. This was nice in that it was an excellent excuse not to do work and just sit in front of the TV. It was not so nice in that we no longer have cable TV (would that have helped?) and broadcast TV (at least) is really sucky.
[[Embedded YouTube Movie Perfect Strangers Intro]]
I don't know what time the national news comes on in LA on Saturdays, but it is apparently not 6:30 pm like it is on the weekdays (I think). We normally watch the news on the internet cuz (a) less commercials (though TV on the internet is on various stages of development, depending on the network, and there was like a 3 month period last year when the only commercial on the NBC Nightly News was for ... some car company. It had a stupid poem read by a kid-like voice that went "Say I had a car company, here's what I'd do. I'd tell everybody to listen to you ...". Read about it in this well-written, insightful article by "Kyle Hagen".) and (b) then you can skip the boring stories about e.g. how cold it is for those suckers east of California, blah blah blah :).
Anyways, we watched the local news. The first story was about car commercials, and featured rock'n'roll theme music through the entire thing, and was not altogether discernible from a regular car commercial (Hollywood, I guess).
The second was a story about a "scam" where some companies were offering to help you apply for property tax relief and charging $100, when you could fill out a form for free yourself. I'm not sure that's a scam, since there are lots of things like that. Like income taxes, for instance. Apparently, one of the companies listed their address as a P.O. box at a UPS store, and they showed footage of the local news reporter interviewing the clerk at the UPS store, saying "So this isn't the headquarters for blah-blah-blah company?" It was completely retarded.
When we first moved to San Diego, we had no internet at all, and after that, only dial-up. That wasn't that long ago, maybe 5 years. So, my question is, what did I spend all my time doing in the past? And is my life better now, whatever better means?
In any case, I think this weekend is evidence that the internet is out to brainwash me and turn me into a loveless troll. Speaking of Perfect Strangers (in case you missed it, the previous link was to the "I Watched this on Purpose" review of the thriller "Perfect Stranger"), the theme song to it is super-awesome:
[[Embedded YouTube Movie Perfect Strangers Intro]]
The little dramatic pause with the "duh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh" at the end is so heart-wrenching. By the way, you know which show is unwatchably awful as an adult? Perfect Strangers! I don't remember where I saw it recently, but it was really bad.
Friday, January 23, 2009
On Blogging and the Social Internet
As I don't really read any blogs other than the NYT xword blog and Bibliodyssey, perhaps I have no qualifications for commenting on this, but I will anyways.
This blog is fun for me to write as well as for me to look back over (even tho I haven't been adding to it for that long). I get to embed images and video that have tickled my fancy, and therefore get to feel like it is mine, in terms of remembering it and showing it off to others. "Look how cool I am! I saw this and I liked it!" I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's like being a fan of your local sports team and reflected glory.
from "Blogging Tips: Keep it legal - How to avoid committing libel" by wholeenchilada
However, I'm not sure that my blog has any interest to other people. I suppose the things I like say something about my personality, so if you know me, maybe you would be interested in that. Or, if you like the things that I like, then maybe it is a useful collection of links. Other than that, it really doesn't add any content to the internet -- no nodes, just edges, in graph terminology.
That makes me feel like the blog is somewhat hollow -- it's got a lot of pictures and stuff so it looks all fancy, but it reminds me of writing my thesis. I started with a Latex template that auto-created title pages and tables of contents and figures and acknowledgments, and even before I'd written anything, it already looked impressive. Anyways, I thought I'd add some content to the blog by writing a few paragraphs about how the blog has no content :). Yes! Mission accomplished!
[[ Comment: All the above was one paragraph before, but I remembered an interesting and relevant article I read about how people read on the web: Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online. Since I'm already being super metahyperselfaware in this post ...]]
from F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content
I've also been thinking about the social web this week. Recently, I read an article about why Facebook is an important first step to the social web (I don't remember where the article was from; I'll look for it later). It said that the ideal social web would be one where, wherever you go on the web, if one of your friends has been there before, he can leave comments and notes that you can read and then discuss the article, etc.
Lots of places on the web let you leave comments, but they are comments that anybody can see, and, more importantly, when you look at the comments section, you see the comments of a bunch of random retards you don't care about. There is some use to seeing the comments of strangers if the webpage is about a rather obscure topic -- you can meet people with similar obsessions (e.g. I read and add to the comments on RP Does the NYT Xword). But, if you're watching a video on YouTube with 1.26 million views, undoubtedly most of the comments are vitriolic spam from angry, angry people with poor spelling and grammar skills, and who wants to read that?
from Spongebob Motivation by FramedThief
Google Reader lets you do this to some degree, I think. I signed up for it yesterday -- I'll let you know. You don't really get a lot of freedom, though, in how you can note -- you can't highlight text or make comments while reading, you just can make a note when you share an article you read. Also, I don't think it allows any social back and forth.
I also don't think it has the Facebook News Feed feature, which is the best thing about Facebook, to me, anyways. I haven't been on Facebook for very long, but I feel like I better know and am more involved in the lives of the few "friends" I have that comment regularly, and that is from the News Feed which tells me my "friends'" status updates and silly posts. Someone should invent a catchy word for a Facebook friend, by the way. I will do it. Facefriend. Patent pending.
It's not a deep friendship that I've found through Facebook, but it is definitely an amusing distraction, particularly in my world, where everyone I know (including myself) is career-driven, and only lives in the same place for a couple years at a time. I've been struggling since I moved to Pasadena to make any new actual friendships. This is mostly because I'm shy and have huge social phobias, but partly because I'm at the age where people are starting to have full-fledged families, and perhaps partly cuz I'm at Caltech, which is not renowned for its socially-disposed students.
When I first started with Facebook, I found it uncomfortable, as I was friends with people I hadn't talked with in a while, and my News Feed was telling me all kinds of random stuff about them. It felt like spying, or something. Now, though, it feels a lot more natural, as really there are only a few people I know who write stuff regularly to their Facebook account, and I leave little comments to them about their posts on occasion, and they will on occasion leave comments on my posts. So, I'm cool with Facebook now, even if that Facebook guy Mark Zuckerberg sounds like a total jerkasaurus. Ooh, Kyle and I have an awesome Facebook app idea for that, by the way.
from Dinosaur Comics
I'm waiting for the Facebook app that lets you mark-up and comment the HTML webpages you read and share, lets you know when a webpage you read but didn't share is shared and commented by a facefriend, and lets you browse the pages shared and discussed by your facefriends through a News Feed-like interface. When the number of pages shared gets to be large enough that you don't want to look through them all, it would be cool to use some machine learning tools to order the pages shown to you.
Once we've got virtual reality down and we all have implanted microchips feeding information to all our sensory organs (or maybe we just need an iphone? I don't even have a camera on my phone yet, so I don't know what iphones can accomplish. I hear it is miracles, tho :)), it will be cool to be able to comment and share random things in the physical world as well -- I'm imagining little virtual glowing post-it notes everywhere.
By the way, I think my facefriend Daniel B.'s new Facebook app Helpy is a step toward the social world. It allows you to make requests for help of any kind to your facefriends who also have the app installed (note I am getting annoyed at myself for every use of the new catchy term facefriend :)). For instance, I have a broken fluorescent floor lamp, and I added a (virtual) comment to it asking people if they knew how to fix it (of course they don't, but it would have been cool if they did). I also added a comment to a memory I have from the '80's, and was able to solve a decades old mystery. Decades!
Anyways, I feel a little better about there not being any words on this blog, as now I have added way too many boring sentences for any human to possibly read and pay attention. Here, let me go back and add some bold phrases so that it is more parse-able :).
This blog is fun for me to write as well as for me to look back over (even tho I haven't been adding to it for that long). I get to embed images and video that have tickled my fancy, and therefore get to feel like it is mine, in terms of remembering it and showing it off to others. "Look how cool I am! I saw this and I liked it!" I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's like being a fan of your local sports team and reflected glory.
from "Blogging Tips: Keep it legal - How to avoid committing libel" by wholeenchiladaHowever, I'm not sure that my blog has any interest to other people. I suppose the things I like say something about my personality, so if you know me, maybe you would be interested in that. Or, if you like the things that I like, then maybe it is a useful collection of links. Other than that, it really doesn't add any content to the internet -- no nodes, just edges, in graph terminology.
That makes me feel like the blog is somewhat hollow -- it's got a lot of pictures and stuff so it looks all fancy, but it reminds me of writing my thesis. I started with a Latex template that auto-created title pages and tables of contents and figures and acknowledgments, and even before I'd written anything, it already looked impressive. Anyways, I thought I'd add some content to the blog by writing a few paragraphs about how the blog has no content :). Yes! Mission accomplished!
[[ Comment: All the above was one paragraph before, but I remembered an interesting and relevant article I read about how people read on the web: Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online. Since I'm already being super metahyperselfaware in this post ...]]
from F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web ContentI've also been thinking about the social web this week. Recently, I read an article about why Facebook is an important first step to the social web (I don't remember where the article was from; I'll look for it later). It said that the ideal social web would be one where, wherever you go on the web, if one of your friends has been there before, he can leave comments and notes that you can read and then discuss the article, etc.
Lots of places on the web let you leave comments, but they are comments that anybody can see, and, more importantly, when you look at the comments section, you see the comments of a bunch of random retards you don't care about. There is some use to seeing the comments of strangers if the webpage is about a rather obscure topic -- you can meet people with similar obsessions (e.g. I read and add to the comments on RP Does the NYT Xword). But, if you're watching a video on YouTube with 1.26 million views, undoubtedly most of the comments are vitriolic spam from angry, angry people with poor spelling and grammar skills, and who wants to read that?
from Spongebob Motivation by FramedThiefGoogle Reader lets you do this to some degree, I think. I signed up for it yesterday -- I'll let you know. You don't really get a lot of freedom, though, in how you can note -- you can't highlight text or make comments while reading, you just can make a note when you share an article you read. Also, I don't think it allows any social back and forth.
I also don't think it has the Facebook News Feed feature, which is the best thing about Facebook, to me, anyways. I haven't been on Facebook for very long, but I feel like I better know and am more involved in the lives of the few "friends" I have that comment regularly, and that is from the News Feed which tells me my "friends'" status updates and silly posts. Someone should invent a catchy word for a Facebook friend, by the way. I will do it. Facefriend. Patent pending.
It's not a deep friendship that I've found through Facebook, but it is definitely an amusing distraction, particularly in my world, where everyone I know (including myself) is career-driven, and only lives in the same place for a couple years at a time. I've been struggling since I moved to Pasadena to make any new actual friendships. This is mostly because I'm shy and have huge social phobias, but partly because I'm at the age where people are starting to have full-fledged families, and perhaps partly cuz I'm at Caltech, which is not renowned for its socially-disposed students.
When I first started with Facebook, I found it uncomfortable, as I was friends with people I hadn't talked with in a while, and my News Feed was telling me all kinds of random stuff about them. It felt like spying, or something. Now, though, it feels a lot more natural, as really there are only a few people I know who write stuff regularly to their Facebook account, and I leave little comments to them about their posts on occasion, and they will on occasion leave comments on my posts. So, I'm cool with Facebook now, even if that Facebook guy Mark Zuckerberg sounds like a total jerkasaurus. Ooh, Kyle and I have an awesome Facebook app idea for that, by the way.
from Dinosaur ComicsI'm waiting for the Facebook app that lets you mark-up and comment the HTML webpages you read and share, lets you know when a webpage you read but didn't share is shared and commented by a facefriend, and lets you browse the pages shared and discussed by your facefriends through a News Feed-like interface. When the number of pages shared gets to be large enough that you don't want to look through them all, it would be cool to use some machine learning tools to order the pages shown to you.
Once we've got virtual reality down and we all have implanted microchips feeding information to all our sensory organs (or maybe we just need an iphone? I don't even have a camera on my phone yet, so I don't know what iphones can accomplish. I hear it is miracles, tho :)), it will be cool to be able to comment and share random things in the physical world as well -- I'm imagining little virtual glowing post-it notes everywhere.
By the way, I think my facefriend Daniel B.'s new Facebook app Helpy is a step toward the social world. It allows you to make requests for help of any kind to your facefriends who also have the app installed (note I am getting annoyed at myself for every use of the new catchy term facefriend :)). For instance, I have a broken fluorescent floor lamp, and I added a (virtual) comment to it asking people if they knew how to fix it (of course they don't, but it would have been cool if they did). I also added a comment to a memory I have from the '80's, and was able to solve a decades old mystery. Decades!
Anyways, I feel a little better about there not being any words on this blog, as now I have added way too many boring sentences for any human to possibly read and pay attention. Here, let me go back and add some bold phrases so that it is more parse-able :).
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
"After you, Alphonse"
Today's NYT xword puzzle featured, among other references from the 19-aught's, the comic strip "Alphonse and Gaston". This comic strip appears to be for the French what the Little Black Sambo was for African-Americans. Of course, it's still cool in America to poke fun at the French (e.g. Borat in Talladega Nights -- hilarious!). What I find most disturbing about the comic is that "Their routine 'After you, Alphonse.', 'No, you first, my dear Gaston!' entertained readers for more than a decade" [Wikipedia]. People are simple.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
More Wordle
I was playing with the Wordle app used to generate the Most Common Crossword Answers visualization, and made this from some of the lyrics to Radiohead's 2+2=5 from Hail to the Thief. Try #2 (well, really 3, but 2 is not worth mentioning...):
Even more:
Even more:
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
donate to wikipedia
cupcakes
I like cupcakes. They are almost as good to look at as to eat, and looking at pictures of cupcakes is almost as good as looking at cupcakes:
where I'd approximate
(Note that the goodness of eating cupcakes is slightly decreased by the way they make my stomach feel post-eating ... I ate a cupcake for breakfast ...) So, this blog post is not completely worthless; by my calculation it is at least .375 times as good as eating a cupcake. Yum.
Photos from the "Cupcakes Galore" photo set by the Bleeding Heart Bakery on Flickr:
"Dreamsicle Cupcake" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert
"Many Lovely Organic Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert
"Gluten Free Organic Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert
Photos from the "Cupcakes" set by 4GoodnessCake on Flickr:
where I'd approximate
(Note that the goodness of eating cupcakes is slightly decreased by the way they make my stomach feel post-eating ... I ate a cupcake for breakfast ...) So, this blog post is not completely worthless; by my calculation it is at least .375 times as good as eating a cupcake. Yum.
Photos from the "Cupcakes Galore" photo set by the Bleeding Heart Bakery on Flickr:
"Dreamsicle Cupcake" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert"Many Lovely Organic Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert"Gluten Free Organic Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert
Photos from the "Cupcakes" set by 4GoodnessCake on Flickr:
Monday, January 5, 2009
"Noble Beast"
There's an article about Andrew Bird's new album "Noble Beast" in the NYT magazine this week, and NPR is streaming the entire album here. Here's my favorite video: sheecahgoh.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
some anti-microsoft humor
"There are multiple reports springing up all over the internet of a mass suicide of Microsoft 30GB Zune players globally..." [slashdot]. I read on msnbc (remembering that ms stands for microsoft) that the bug was related to '08 being a leap year, which seemed kind of crazy. According to this site, the code containing the bug was the following:year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */which just seems like the most retarded piece of code ever. If it were me, I would have just used / and * or / and % even, but perhaps they were worried that that would be slower because it is maybe repeating some of the computation [I just tested this (I am bored -- everyone is sleeping but me), and the while -=, += method is over twice as slow as the /, * method]. So, way to go Microsoft.
while (days > 365)
{
if (IsLeapYear(year))
{
if (days > 366)
{
days -= 366;
year += 1;
}
}
else
{
days -= 365;
year += 1;
}
}
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