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: