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November 16th, 2009
 | 10:08 pm - Not a record, but the right direction
Four papers read in the last two days.
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 | 08:42 pm - Reasons to get work done
Cris just started watching Lilo & Stitch. All of the humans have excessively large and rather oddly positioned noses. I find this quite off-putting.
Also, the main character is apparently a psychopath.
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November 15th, 2009
November 14th, 2009
November 13th, 2009
November 12th, 2009
November 11th, 2009
November 10th, 2009
November 9th, 2009
November 8th, 2009
November 5th, 2009
| 08:42 am - No more laptops?
Okay, we already know the story, but did you know...
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., introduced a bill Thursday to ban nonessential electronics, including personal laptops, from the cockpit.
"We simply want to ensure that, with all of the electronic distractions available these days, flying the plane remains the their one and only focus," Menendez said in a statement.
Okay, come on. We all know these guys really managed to both fall asleep in the flight deck and didn't wake up until the plane was in Wisconsin. But instead of addressing the actual problem, you want to make sure to take away their excuse? Sheesh.
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November 4th, 2009
November 2nd, 2009
November 1st, 2009
 | 01:44 pm
Eddi: There's a lever here. I'm gonna pull it. Any objections?
Mal: No, just give me a minute to put my spike-proof hat on.
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October 26th, 2009
October 25th, 2009
October 23rd, 2009
| 12:46 am - Faith manages
"Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. There would never be another. It changed the future, and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another because if we don't, who will? And that true strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely places. Mostly, though, I think it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings. Even for people like us."
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October 21st, 2009
| 08:28 pm - Basic Excel feature request
This seems like it should be simple. I want to be able to make a worksheet full of data and charts showing assorted data summaries. I want to be able to cut copy and paste that into a new worksheet, and plug in a new day's batch of data. (So far, no problem). I would then love to be able to click a button that updates all of the graphs on the worksheet to the data in the same location on that worksheet.
I suppose I could probably use a template to do this, but A: don't wanna, B: I do make enough day-to-day changes to my data analysis that I would like to be able to easily choose between how I analyzed the data yesterday and how I analyzed it a week or three months ago, and C: I don't have enough faith in Excel to actually have gotten that far right.
The really frustrating thing is that this has gotten significantly harder since I upgraded to 2007, which is otherwise a significant improvement. Whereas before it could be accomplished with a right-click-left-click-enter or a right-click-tab-left-click-repeat-enter, it's now an complicated process that takes a couple minutes for each chart, which is really frustrating when I'm trying to update a dozen charts or so per worksheet while catching up on a week or two's worth of data.
[/vent]
Current Music: Doctor Who - Bad Wolf
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October 19th, 2009
October 18th, 2009
 | 10:06 am - Awesome
More at the link. They're all awesome.
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October 15th, 2009
October 14th, 2009
October 13th, 2009
October 11th, 2009
| 11:44 pm - By the way...
What's with all these HK dramas the last couple years taking place before the handover for no readily apparent reason? Especially when all the characters either use super-thin laptops or have tiny flip-top cell phones?
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 | 11:29 pm - Oh, thank you Wacko, it all makes sense now...
Discovery of the night: it turns out that my big recent director discovery--Pang Ho-Cheung (You Shoot, I Shoot (probably in my top 10 of the year), Exodus, Isabella (which I just watched & is fantastic), Men Suddenly in Black (which is still indefinitely unavailable on Netflix))--was also the author of the novel Fulltime Killer, which the same-titled Johnnie To film is an adaptation of. Which is one of my favorite Johnnie To films.
So anyway, it makes a lot of sense, because his own films--especially Exodus, and a little bit the other two--have a pretty similar vibe, especially a similar black humor and a similar (but less explicit) meta undertone to them.
As for Isabella?
I thought it was very good. Definitely something to watch if you are in the mood for something a little more on the slow/arty side, with a strong emphasis on character & little emphasis on plot. Those who are actually seeking such may find it a bit insubstantial, but I thought it was excellent. It kept me rapt throughout, which is a pretty decent accomplishment.
Oh, yeah. It bears pointing out that Isabella Leong & Chapman To are both really good in it and the latter, at least, seems like quite an accomplishment as I wouldn't have believed he could pull off such a subtle role.
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| 03:28 pm - Stupid Gaming Jokes
Mal: Well, I slowed this guy for you, so if you can't kill him we don't deserve to be here and should just go do our laundry somewhere else.
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October 10th, 2009
October 6th, 2009
October 3rd, 2009
| 10:47 pm - Quick bleg
I'm looking for some free software that can take a directory of .jpgs and merge them into a single pdf. I use to have a command-line tool installed on my computer at UMN that fulfilled this task, but I can't seem to find anything to do it.
Oh, yes, obviously it must be A: free and B: not watermark the pages.
Suggestions?
Thanks!
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October 1st, 2009
September 30th, 2009
September 27th, 2009
September 26th, 2009
September 25th, 2009
September 24th, 2009
| 10:16 pm - General announcement to the peanut gallery (or maybe just myself)
Thing #1: As part of a general new nose-reapplied-to-the-grindstone commitment I'm making to myself, I've decided to set myself a goal of reading at least one paper or relevant textbook chapter a day. To assist myself in following through on this task, I've decided to also try and make myself post little blurbs on each of them--synopses, notes, & whatnot--also, hopefully, each day.
Thing #2: As part of same commitment, I'm also going to try and do some mini-posts briefly going over what I do each day, just to force myself to actually be productive each day (or at least own up to it if I'm not). This will also hopefully include acknowledgments of things I wanted to do but didn't; whether it be due to lack of time, energy, or motivation.
Unfortunately, the nature of these posts is probably going to involve insight into my current projects around the lab. Due to the cutthroat fear-of-being-scooped nature of modern science--and even moreso out of respect to my labmates and PI, whose projects may also be involved (or at least interpreted by those with proper insight)--I'll be making some to all of these posts friends-only on lj to make sure I have control over who sees them. I'm sorry if a facebook-only friend feels screwed out of this, but I'll be honest enough to admit I don't think there's actually anyone who will miss the content. Regardless, however, if someone out there really cares it's not too much effort to make a livejournal account and friend me, and I would of course be honored if such occurred.
All for now.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif) Peppermint tea
Current Music: Makyo - Devabansha (Tantric Laswell mix) | Powered by Last.fm
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September 23rd, 2009
 | 10:18 pm - Quotes from William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg's "The Yage Letters Redux"
"A Materialistic consciousness is attempting to preserve itself from Dissolution by restriction & persecution of Experience of the Transcendental. One day perhaps the Earth will be dominated by the illusion of Separate consciousness, the Bureaucrats having triumphed in seizing control of all roads of communication with the Divine, & restricting traffic. But Sleep & Death cannot evade the Great Dream of Being, and the victory of the Bureaucrats of Illusion is only an Illusion of their separate world of consciousness." - Allen Ginsberg, quoted in the introduction by Oliver Harris
Quotes from the text:
"I was getting off junk and he kept nagging me why was I kidding myself once a junkie always a junkie. If I quit junk I would become a sloppy lush or go crazy taking cocaine."
"He told me exactly what I would need for the trip, where to go and who to contact. I asked him about the telepathy angle. 'That's all imagination of course,' he said."
"I never feel flattered by this promiscuous liking for Americans. It is insulting to individual dignity, and no good ever comes from these America lovers."
"Like the U.S. Pegler fans say, 'The trouble is Unions.' They would still say it spitting blood from radiation sickness. Or in process of turning into crustaceans."
"It's your duty to turn in the guerrillas and work and know your place and listen to the priest. What an old con! Like trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge."
"I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent backwoods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oil men, a Swedish Botanist, a Dutch Ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as The Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by the Cocoa Commission and Point Four)."
"After five days in Puerto Assis I was well on the way to establish myself as a citizen in the capacity of village wastrel."
"The Brujo of Mocoa told me if a woman witnesses the preparation the Yage spoils on the spot and will poison anyone who drinks it or at least drive him insane. The old women-are-dirty-and-under-certain-circumstances-poisonous routine. I figured this was a chance to test the woman pollution myth once and for all with seven female creatures breathing down my neck, poking sticks in the mixture, fingering the Yage and giggling."
Puerto Leguizamo is named for a soldier who distinguished himself in the Peruvian War of 1940. I asked one of the Colombians about it and he nodded, 'Yes, Leguizamo was a soldier who did something in the war.'
'What did he do?'
'Well, he did something.'
"So here I am back in Bogota. No money waiting for me (check apparently stolen), I am forced to the shoddy expedient of stealing my drinking alcohol from the university laboratory placed at disposal of the visiting scientist."
"Arrested on the beach suspect to have floated up from Peru on the Humboldt Current with a young boy and a tooth brush (I travel light, only the essentials)..."
"In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in dreary boredom. Even a man like Oppenheimer is a deviant tolerated for his usefulness. Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in U.S."
This is a nation of kleptomaniacs. In all my experience as a homosexual I have never been the victim of such idiotic pilferings of articles no conceivable use to anyone else. Glasses and traveler's checks yet.
Trouble is I share with the late Father Flanagan--he of Boy's Town--the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy.
"Yage is space time travel. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian--new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized passes through your body (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants sprout out of your cock and vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of the body), across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market."
"...get nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe..."
"This is the most powerful drug I have ever experienced. That is it produces the most complete derangement of the senses. You see everything from an hallucinated viewpoint. Yage' is not like anything else. This is not the electric euphoria of coke which activates channels of pure pleasure in the brain, the sexless, timeless, negative pleasure of opium."
"I have observed in using both yage' and Peyote a strange, vegetable consciousness, an identification with the plant. In Peyote intoxication everything looks like a Peyote plant. It is easy to understand how the Indians came to believe there is a spirit in these plants."
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September 22nd, 2009
| 07:22 pm - Stupid Gaming Jokes
Chase (waving hands around): Okay, so you are in an alley, and he's over there, while you're going *around* the buildings...
Mal: You know what be useful right now? Some sort of *two-dimensional* representation of our surroundings...
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September 21st, 2009
September 20th, 2009
 | 02:49 pm - Approval Data
From the Daily Kos State of the Nation poll (found here); all data is favorable / unfavorable with last week's data in parentheses
Obama:
* Northeast: 82 / 10 (83 / 11)
* South: 27 / 67 (28 / 68)
* Midwest: 62 / 31 (63 / 32)
* West: 59 / 34 (60 / 35)
Democratic Party:
* Northeast: 62 / 26 (61 / 27)
* South: 20 / 70 (19 / 71)
* Midwest: 46 / 47 (45 / 48)
* West: 44 / 48 (43 / 49)
Republican Party:
* Northeast: 7 / 87 (6 / 88)
* South: 50 / 37 (49 / 38)
* Midwest: 13 / 78 (12 / 79)
* West: 14 / 75 (13 / 76)
Mostly I find the regional data a good reminder in regards to recent discussions of Obama's approval ratings--he's still pretty damn popular, there's just one region of the country where he's actively hated (and honestly, it would be pretty interesting to see the regional data broken down by race at this point). I would also like to point out that basically, the difference in Obama's data between last week and this week is that everyone was a point more decisive last week.
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| 09:16 am - Comment Spam
Okay, what's the point of this Japanese & Engrish comment spam I've been getting? Is anyone else getting it? I mostly find it interesting because there's no attempt to, you know, link or even refer to a product that they could be advertising. It's just some sort of automated implantation of bilingual nonsense on my lj.
How odd.
Current Music: Juno Reactor - Magnetic (Robert Leiner remix) | Powered by Last.fm
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September 19th, 2009
| 10:15 pm - Awesomeness (in a bad way)
Paging thru some random stuff on emusic, I discover this album, which is one of those random comps that re-records the theme songs from a bunch of famous movies and TV shows so they don't have to pay performance residuals.
Including the theme from Mortal Kombat.
With people reciting the sampled lines from the movie.
I'm trying to decide if this is worth a track. I mean, tracks are worth way more now.
Current Music: Hybridz - Spiritual Aura (Remix) | Powered by Last.fm
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| 08:58 pm - Dover sale at the UW bookstore
I picked up The Golden Bough, A Princess of Mars, At the Earth's Core, and The Story of Siegfried (collection of retellings from the Eddas by James Baldwin) for a total of $15. Which, I suppose, means I actually saved all of $11 because--hey!--they're Dover books.
Resisted: Pellucidar (figured I'd wait until I read At the Earth's Core in case I never get around to it), The Three Musketeers (waiting until I read the unabridged The Count of Monte Cristo I picked up in the Spring), the Kama Sutra (tittered like a schoolgirl instead), other books I've already forgotten (two of which had "pirates" in the title), and a whole bunch of chess guides.
Couldn't find: Linus Pauling's Organic Chemistry, Euclid's Elements, anything else particularly textbooky.
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September 18th, 2009
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malcubed's journal