if this isn't nice, i don't know what is

Glow Worms, from Rainforest Explorer

I had an "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is" moment this afternoon. I went to the gym and had a pretty decent workout after a week off of lifting. It was in the high 90s here today, so it was too hot to sit in the apartment. This, combined with the battery on my laptop being virtually juseless, was an excellent excuse not to do any work and instead sit on the step outside my apartment and read. I'm reading River Town by Peter Hessler right now, which is like relaxing with a smarter, worldly, interesting friend at this point (I read Oracle Bones also by Hessler a couple months ago). I listened to "It's Frightening" by White Rabbits on a loop on my iqob, which I have heard enough times by now to be used to it, and really it was just there in the background to detach me slightly more from the world. There was a nice breeze, and it was the absolute perfect temperature for sitting in my post-workout soccer shorts and sports bra. Occasionally I would lie back on the sidewalk, which was nice and cool. And it was just so relaxing. After a little while, my favorite stray kitty came for a visit and curled up at my feet so that I would pet her. I have decided to name her Bellybellysunshine, as she shares a personality with my previous favorite stray kitty Mrs. Bellywhomper, who disappeared over Christmas. Bellybellysunshine wandered off after a while to chase bugs, and I continued reading the late chapters of my comfortable book. It was a nice afternoon. I hope I can remember it.

P.S. I just watched Life in the Undergrowth Ep. 3: The Silk Spinners, which starts out showing glow worm strands. They are beautiful! More pics can be found here.

pretty plots

I've been generating lots of plots. More than I know what to do with. Here is my favorite. I'm not going to describe what it is, cuz that would be boring. But, look at the pretty colors!

hipster albums

To go along with my last post, here are some albums I may or may not think I like. In any case, I listened to them today. I can say that for sure.


Far by Regina Spektor [NPR]


Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective [imeem]
(I am pretty sure I think op-art is awesome.)


It's Frightening by White Rabbits [imeem]


A Mad and Faithful Telling by Devotchka [imeem]

way to breathe, no-breath

"Small Talk", by Shane Vorhaben

On my run today, I started thinking about how I was breathing. This is a common mistake I make cuz, no matter what, breathing then feels wrong. I'm wondering if an analogy can be made to to thinking about my life and choices. Do I really like the things I say I like? Do I really want to do the things I say I want to do? Or do I just think I should like/want to do these things? Or, even worse, do I just think that someone else wants me to like/want these things? What is the disconnect between saying and thinking and doing? Maybe if I just don't think about anything, everything will turn out okay. Then again, maybe life decisions are something one should think about, unlike breathing. In any case, I am marginally certain that I am feeling uncertain and out-of-step with life in general. There's my deep thought for the day.

helpless

Molting Cicada, Wikipedia

I am pretty sure the world sucks, and I am feeling very helpless about that this week. I am feeling helpless about the protesters in Iran, and what Khamenei and his government have given the militias the okay to do. I watched maybe 15 minutes of "This Week with George S." this morning, and heard the retarded, shallow argument between Lindsey Graham and Chris Dodd about how the U.S. should respond to the situation. Should we condemn the Iranian government or strongly condemn them? It doesn't matter, (a) because everyone knows which side the U.S. is on and (b) no intelligent person is going to believe that the U.S. engineered the revolt. Plus, I was annoyed that the segment should be on the U.S. 's response to the situation, not the situation itself.

I am feeling helpless that Obama's "sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system" sounds like a whole lotta nothing, and that the government is still primarily concerned with the interests of the banking industry. Same with his promise of transparent government, as his administration has followed the Bush administration in keeping logs of who visits the White House secret.

Also, the new report on global warming makes the future sound more hopeless than ever. Maybe I should stop reading the news ...

Well, at least bugs are cool. I've been watching "Life in the Undergrowth", which has some absolutely amazing footage of absolutely amazing bugs. There are some clips from the show here. So, like I said, at least we have bugs to be happy about.

Latex for Inkscape

For some reason the default renderer for Latex equations in Inkscape stopped working for me (I think it used to work ...). In any case, I just installed the textext extension. I thought I'd post the steps that worked for me. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy.

1. Install pdf2svg. I don't know if this was necessary. I already had pstoedit installed, but I was first trying to fix eqtexsvg which I believe ships with Inkscape. I followed the instructions provided at http://www.cityinthesky.co.uk/pdf2svg.html verbatim.
2. Download the textext tar ball from http://www.elisanet.fi/ptvirtan/software/textext/.
3. Unarchive, and copy textext.inx and textext.py to /usr/share/inkscape/extensions . Note that the installation instructions claimed that you could put this in $HOME/.inkscape/extensions, but the extensions subdirectory did not exist for me and creating one and placing the relevant files inside did nothing. This was the only confusing part of the installation.
   

This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes

I am hoping that automated phone systems that use voice recognition are actually recording users' responses. Cuz I know that at least K. can sound very irate and/or silly when repeating himself to these machines. If there are such recordings, it would be great (and probably highly illegal) if someone could to make some kind of collage of all the weird things people say when talking to voice recognition machines. Assuming that people other than K. say weird things. That is all I have to say about that.

Matlab is making me angry!

I love Matlab, but I do not love the following behavior:

>> trx = struct('firstframe',mat2cell((1:200),1,200),'f2i',cell(1,200));
>> for i = 1:length(trx),
trx(i).f2i = @(f) f - trx(i).firstframe + 1;
end
>> tic; clear trx; toc;
Elapsed time is 129.714695 seconds.

Over two minutes? I am now going to be writing a function to go through all my code and replace calls to f2i with the function's definition. It's actually even worse with the real data, for no apparent reason:

>> load(trxfilename);
>> trx

trx =

1x196 struct array with fields:
x
y
theta
a
b
id
moviename
firstframe
arena
nframes
endframe
matname
x_mm
y_mm
a_mm
b_mm
pxpermm
fps

>> for i = 1:length(trx),
trx(i).f2i = @(f) f - trx(i).firstframe + 1;
end
>> tic; clear trx; toc;
Elapsed time is 626.516941 seconds.

things that are good in stuff

I am eating oatmeal (pictured above). It is Ralph's brand Maple and Brown Sugar instant oatmeal, with added brown sugar and dried cranberries. Here is my list of stuff that is good in oatmeal:

• Sugar
• Syrup
• Raisins
• Dried cranberries
• Milk

That is all! I used to put chocolate chips in as a kid, but I have realized now that that is wrong. Also, I really like strawberries and cream oatmeal, so whatever those strawberry flakes are is also good in oatmeal. Peach flakes too. I contend that this is the least interesting, most useless list on the entire internet.

Here is another list, almost as boring. Stuff that is good in pancakes:

• Chocolate chips
• Bananas
• Blueberries
• Cranberries

So that this post isn't completely boring, here is something I have that I'm pretty sure any sane person would want:

It is a jiggly green lobster! The legs and claws and antennae are on springs and jiggle independently! And there is even glitter on the base! It is the greatest, most useless thing ever, and it only cost $2!

TiltShift This!

Japanese Gardens at the Huntington, miniaturized.

The TiltShift Maker lets you upload photos, then applies some kind of blurring and color enhancing transform to the photos to make them look like they're of photos of miniature stuff.

Nice 1

St. Peter's Basilica

Nice 2

Nice 3

Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

kids fail at stuff

i can't get enough of these videos of kids completely failing at various stuffs:

May 35th

Trying to Evade the Censors, NYT

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Hey! It's the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre! I've been somewhat fascinated with Chinese politics lately, after reading Oracle Bones a couple months ago and 1984 more recently. Not fascinated enough to, say, be able to tell you the name of the Chinese president. Wait, that's a lie! I do know it! Hu Jintao! [I'm smart, not like everybody says, not dumb!] It's not really politics, but the censorship and totalitarianism thing that I find fascinating.

It is so not necessary for us -- we let apathy and stupidity and capitalistic concerns censor and totalitarize us. As an American busy studying the behaviors of fruit flies in a petri dish (that's my job...), I also don't concern myself with the outrages my government committed 20 years ago and continues to commit. Maybe that is just from the hopelessness and practicality of being an individual with a firm grasp of statistics, and the pessimism of some understanding of what motivates myself and this sea of people I swim among. Maybe I have already been brainwashed into only caring whether my "team" (Go Democrats!) is winning. As Vonnegut said, "Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative". The only presidential candidate I have ever wanted to vote for (vs. wanting to vote against the other guy) still gives speeches full of the same platitudes that progress the status quo.

So, how different is the state of censorship in China? As Zhang Lijia writes on the China Beat blog, "There’s still a cage in China. But for many, my fellow marchers from Nanjing included, the cage has grown so big that they can’t feel its limitations." Life is more comfortable in China, and growing more comfortable by the minute, leaving many people there with nothing to feel they need to rise up against (or so is my understanding from what I've read). The restrictions on their liberty don't interfere with their daily happiness and hope and aspirations. And if the Chinese are prospering, who am I to say that the lying and hiding information and using fear to control dissidence is wrong? Well, I guess I am Kristin, and I feel that it is very wrong, a thousand times more wrong than George Bush Jr. et al. never admitting the many egregious mistakes made by their administration. And I find that many Chinese are not bothered by their government pretty crazy and also fascinating. Maybe that's the brainwashing again -- my team in this case would be America vs China.

Random reading list:

• After Tiananmen and Prison, a Comfortable but Uneasy Life in the New China, NYT: An interview with Liu Suli who was arrested after the 1989 protests.
• Tiananmen at Twenty, The Nation article by Jeffrey Wasserstrom.
  
• NYT article Police Swarm Tiananmen Square to Bar Protests.
• NYT article about the websites the Chinese government has shut down to commemorate the day: To Shut Off Tiananmen Talk, China Disrupts Sites. Sounds like there's not much to read on the internet in China today.
• Beijing Clamps Down om Media: video on CNN.
• The Legacy of Tiananmen for Chinese Politics, "the Tiananmen movement's significance to China's current leaders", by Susan Shirk.
• Bullets over Beijing: Nicholas Kristof, who was the Beijing bureau chief for the NYT in 1989, describes his memories of the event.
  
• Tiananmen Square, 20 Years Later: News, Photos And Video From Around The World on the Huffington Post.
• Zhang Lijia's article China’s Growing Cage: The Legacy of Tiananmen is an interesting description of the changes in Chinese society from 1989 to now (a shorter, badly edited version was in the NYT here.
• Chapter 3 of Hessler's Oracle Bones recounts his experiences on the 10th anniversary of the massacre. You can read it on Google Books here. James Fallow's wife tells a similar story about the 20th anniversary here.
• China's Forgotten Revolution, a NYT op-ed by Yu Hua.
  

chocolate chip pancakes

"dark chocolate chip pancake" by truck stop tea party

Here is the wisest thought I have had in the past 24 hours:

Chocolate chip pancakes are like cookies that you are allowed to put syrup on.

Suck on that!

why are we drinking coffee?

I've taken to drinking coffee pretty much every day now. I guess I'm addicted. I don't feel like I need it to function, but it is like a treat I allow myself everyday. I'm not even sure how much I enjoy it sometimes, or if it is just an excuse to ingest some sugar and put off work for a half hour. Perhaps I am just in a funk and I can't seem to believe that much could be enjoyable ever. No, that can't be true, cuz I enjoyed this comic strip, the real excuse for this blog post:

"Mmmm, Coffee", from Dog Hates ME