This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.
It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)
I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.
I'm one of those people who, for most of his life, has been effortlessly skinny. (Lately, it's taking a little effort, but that's mostly because I'm not in my twenties anymore, and I can't drink two or three liters of Mountain Dew every day like I could back then.) I'm also not a doctor or dietician. This means that I'm not qualified to comment on obesity. For the most part, I'm aware of this, and aside from my vocal hatred of the fast food industry, I generally keep my mouth shut. There are certain medical conditions that have been tied to obesity, and at times I do worry about my obese friends, but again, I keep my mouth shut, if for no reason beyond figuring that they know these risks better than I do.
However, despite my complete lack of qualifications, I feel safe in saying a few things:
There's more. Much more. I suppose there's a certain irony in the fact that I will be using this as gym fuel later, but I'm doing that because these days, pushing myself harder at the gym is my usual reaction to anger. Some guys have personal trainers -- I have a friend who sends me news articles and blog posts that piss me off.
In my last entry, I mentioned plans to mix two kinds of liquor and expose the mixture to ultraviolet light. Last night, I visited a couple of friends and did just that.
The results were less than encouraging, but still promising -- the mixture glowed, but it was faint. It wasn't the bright green of a glowstick, as I'd pictured and hoped -- it was more the dull green of radioactive waste that you'd see in B horror movies. However, I still plan to repeat this experiment later, changing a few variables.
One: according to Wikipedia, there are two kinds of Crème de Cacao: clear, and dark. I had the dark. The dark stuff is very dark, opaque, almost black. It is certainly possible that something in the reaction product would fluoresce brightly, but in this case, not enough ultraviolet light could get through the darkness. Attempting this experiment again, with the clear version of Crème de Cacao, will likely yield different results.
Two: my source of ultraviolet light was six UV LEDs wired in parallel, obtained from Radio Shack (Cat. 276-0014). I didn't have access to a UV tube, and at the time, six LEDs was all I could get. I've prewired my one of my breadboards to connect up to twelve LEDs, and with more jumpers, I may try as many as twenty-four. Even with all these LEDs, however, the experiment isn't perfect -- these LEDs put out UV, but they also put out a fair amount of blue-white. I may need to forget the LEDs, and find a friend with a tube.
Three: it may just have been my imagination, but the vanilla whiskey seemed to fluoresce on its own, albeit very faintly.
Conclusion: not an immediate unqualified success, but definitely not a failure either. May well become a success later. In any case, whether it was a successful experiment or not, the result is tasty if you like sweet drinks. It also packs a decent punch, at a little over sixty proof (assuming equal portions of ingredients). If you're one of those people who likes getting drunk, but doesn't actually like the taste of alcohol, this is a great way to do it.
Again, thanks to blackfyr and lysana, without whom I'd never have thought to try this.
I have Phillips Union vanilla whiskey. I have Crème de Cacao. And later today, I will have ultraviolet LEDs. This is gonna be awesome!
(Ahem. Sorry. Either lysana or blackfyr once posted about how this particular mix of alcoholic beverages glows green under UV, and I've been dying to try it ever since. I also have a digital camera, so I'll be taking pictures.)
I've been reading too much news that's been making me stabby lately, so I was very much amused to find this (NSFW!). And this (NSFW!).
Short version: Dirty pictures are a dime a dozen... unless they've been on the moon. Then, they're about $200K.
Of course, some people will wring their hands and clutch their pearls about moral turpitude on the part of the astronauts, and on Gizmodo, at least one idiot is bitching about how this reflects poorly on how taxpayer money is spent... but me, I'm just amused. Nope -- I'm not surprised in the least. Astronauts are human, and compared to just about every animal but dolphins and bonobos, humans are really preoccupied with sex. I'll wait until someone does a porn shoot in zero gravity before being surprised.
Ah, who am I kidding? I won't be surprised even then.
(Source. I originally added inthepipeline to my reading because it's the home of Things I Won't Work With," but it's frequently interesting reading even when it isn't discussing chemicals that can kill you or blow up an entire city block in startlingly tiny amounts.)
Those of you who are members of Fandom Wank have heard the phrase "we eat our own." Over at F_W, it means that even if you're a member, it doesn't give you a free pass to wank up a storm or behave like an idiot. Point and giggle with the hyenas all you want when someone else throws a shitfit online, but if you throw a shitfit, the rest of the hyenas will turn on you with their pointing and giggling.
Most of you, wankas or not, probably know that "we eat our own" applies far beyond Fandom Wank. For instance, parenting. Planning to circumcize your kid? Perhaps planning not to? Either way, be prepared to go to war for your choice, because other parents will eat you alive. Getting toys for your kid? Other parents will give you no end of shit if you give your son G.I.Joe, or your daughter Barbie, because you're apparently reinforcing tired old gender roles. Of course, you can't give your boy Barbie without hearing a bunch of shit either. And don't even get me started on the anti-vaxxers...!
And of course there's breastfeeding. (And I can hear a few dozen of you grumbling in my head as I type this.) How dare someone even think of using formula! What kind of mother are they? Well, as it turns out, breastfeeding is nice if you can manage it, but it probably doesn't make as big a difference as you'd think. All the science that says breast is best is based on questionably designed experiments, and there are too many other factors that the experiments don't take into account.
(I'm not posting this with the hopes of starting any serious discussions: I'm male, and I'm not planning on kids, so it's not a question I'll ever have to deal with personally. I bring it up mostly because I'm horribly tempted to have my cat ologbu, or one of my sockpuppets, post this article in boob_nazis.)
When did I completely forget that there's this stuff you can drink called water?
And why am I having to remind myself constantly that it not only exists, but is the cheapest beverage there is? I've recently realized that, while I've successfully kicked Mountain Dew (yet again), I've replaced it with other non-caffeinated soft drinks (mostly fruit juices), and unless I consciously decide not to, I drink them to the exclusion of water without a thought. And I suspect I'm not alone in this. In fact, I suspect that most of us do this.
And when the fuck did High Fructose Corn Syrup get into everything? Has it always been this way? Even in drinks that call themselves "fruit juice," there's HFCS. I can understand why cranberry juice has sweeteners in it -- anyone who's tasted raw cranberries, which are actually rather bitter, can understand that -- but even fruit juices that you'd think are plenty sweet on their own still include HFCS, apparently because HFCS is cheaper than real grape juice. Hell, in all kinds of processed food, even food that you wouldn't think of as sweet in a million years, there's HFCS.
I don't care what ads like this say about it: it's not the same as sugar, and unlike the patsies in those ads, I'm not being paid to stammer like an idiot on camera, so I can explain why. Table sugar (sucrose) is a more complex molecule requiring your body to produce an enzyme (sucrase) to digest it. As a result, there's a limit to how quickly you can absorb it, and it will trigger that mechanism in your body that tells your brain that you're full. HFCS is very easily digestible, so none of this applies. It may be "made from corn," but they process the shit out of it, using a variety of nasty chemicals that tend to remain in HFCS in trace amounts. And while it may be "fine in moderation," moderation is a little difficult when your stomach doesn't tell your brain to stop eating it, and it doesn't help that manufacturers in this country use it in just about everything!
(Yes, there are studies to the contrary, claiming that HFCS is perfectly safe. Most of them, if not all of them, were paid for by corn refiners.)
I'm tempted to write a short science fiction story about it, perhaps one in which HCFS has infiltrated every processed food product there is, and as a result is slowly taking over people's brains and turning them into zombies. It would be a bit too much like The Stuff, though, which is why I'll probably never write it. (This story is up there with my story about a much nastier variant of Toxoplasma gondii, or some other behavior-altering parasite, existing in bacon -- it amuses me to think about, but I'll never actually write that one, either.)
...grrr.
Don't mind me. I'm just pissy because I have the beginnings of a six-pack, and figure that if I cut down on the junk food, I can probably get the rest of the way there fairly easily -- and believe me, I expect no sympathy for this. Unfortunately, I've also concluded that nearly any beverage beyond water, milk, tea, or black coffee counts as junk food, and I've been consuming a lot more of it than I thought. And dammit, I really like cranberry juice.
On the leftmost column of the periodic table, there is a series of elements known as alkali metals. They have certain characteristics in common: they are metallic, and very light in weight. (The top three -- Lithium, Sodium, and Potassium -- will float in water. The other three -- Rubidium, Cesium, and Francium -- will sink, but they are still much lighter than other metals of comparable atomic weight.)
Not that I'm recommending that you put them in water, mind. One of the other traits that alkali metals share is a single electron in the outer valence shell, resulting in a very low ionization potential. This electron can be stripped away by something as simple as water, creating a hydroxide, gaseous hydrogen, and a lot of energy -- and as one moves down the column on the periodic table, this reaction becomes more vigorous.
Or, in plain English, alkali metal plus water equals explosion. And I really just wanted an excuse to post this video. Forgive the bad music, this video is truly awesome!
We can assume that Francium will react with water in a way that will make Cesium look like a firecracker in a mud puddle by comparison, but in all likelihood, we'll never get enough Francium all in one place long enough to try it out -- it's rare, it's radioactive, and its stablest isotopes still have a half-life of less than a half-hour.
Oh, and as long as I'm posting dangerous chemistry stuff here, I've been inspired by a friend of a friend (thank you xylen!) to post Things I Won't Work With. It helps if you at least have fleeting memories of High School Chemistry, but the writer does a reasonably good job of explaining, in layman's terms, some of the truly dangerous shit chemists have uncovered and why it's so fucking dangerous. My favorite is his entry on chlorine trifluoride.
"It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes." -- John D. Clark, PhD.
"Hypergolic with test engineers." Oh, you so funny. My favorite part is "holy shit, it makes SAND explode."
This entry, aside from the math-geek introduction, is about shock sites. Do not click any link you see here if you value your eyes. You have been warned.
Way way back in High School Calculus class, I discovered these things called derivatives.
For those of you unfamiliar, for any function f(x), there is a derivative function f'(x), which tells you the slope of the curve at any given point x on the function f(x). If you have a teacher who insists that you plot functions, derivatives are very useful. For instance, without a derivative, if you have to draw, say f(x) = 3x² + 4x + 8, you have to find roots, and if the function doesn't have any, you're stuck laboriously plotting one point at a time. With a derivative, in this case f'(x) = 6x + 4, it's a whole lot easier: where f'(x) = 0, the curve levels out (in this case, x = -2/3), and once you've got the center of a parabola plotted, the rest is a breeze.
This was all very well and good, until we got to the function f(x) = ex. My calculus teacher asked us where the critical points were on that, and after much arguing and fruitless skullsweat, she walked us through the equations, and we learned something new: this function was its own derivative. There was no point at which it ceased to be small and started to be big. It just looked that way because we were looking at it on a given scale, and if you change the scale, the function shifts.
Exponential functions are like that. They sneak up on us. A tiny number doubles and doubles and doubles, becoming only slightly less tiny, until suddenly it becomes monstrously huge... but its growth has been consistent all along, and it's only because humans tend to think on a certain scale that it seems sudden.
Now, to change the subject a bit... remember when Goatse was considered hardcore?
As I type this, the image at goatse is safe for work, though it clearly alludes to the original... but even the original image -- a man holding his gaping asshole wide open -- is considered tame, even quaint. Tubgirl used to be considered off the scale as far as revolting images go, but now it's passe. Lemon party? Puh-lease. Like old people never have sex, and like all gay men are pretty twenty-somethings?
These days, it seems new shock sites spring up every week. Some of them are really old, but are just now getting new exposure, like Egg Chute. Some are actually new, like 2 girls 1 cup or 4 girls fingerpaint or 2 girls 1 finger or 2 fingers 1 cock. Not all of the new shock sites use the x noun y noun formula, though -- like Touch my Wii or Eel girl. And all of these make Goatse look downright pleasant by comparison.
Then, there's the current worst thing I've ever seen, which is 1 guy 1 jar. (I say current because I'm sure it's only going to be a matter of time before something worse comes along, though I shudder to even guess what. I can only say that if the current trend holds, within two years there will be an image so vile it will instantly kill all who look at it.)
Oh, and in the meantime, the internet (and the scum and villainy that dwell on it) continue to crank out goatse-level shock sites, despite the fact that there are much worse things out there. Bananas, for instance. (I'd include meatspin, hammer time, big bag, and all the other videos on that network, but for some reason, it refuses to load. I'm guessing it has bandwidth issues, which implies that a lot of people are watching it. And if that doesn't frighten you...!)
Well, she's not just a weird bird. She's also a weird snail. And a weird earthworm. And a weird praying mantis. And a weird fly. And a weird bee. And a weird firefly. And a weird spider. ("I would dig my palpae in her epigyne... and run off!") And a weird dragonfly. But it must be said, she's very funny, and very talented.
(Originally found in weepingcock, a community that is normally devoted to hilariously awful written pornography. This kind of video is very much unlike the usual content of that comm, but it's so funny I had to share it anyway.)
"Comment to this post, and I will choose 7 of your interests that I am curious about. You post about them in your own journal and we continue from there."
I replied when ms_daisy_cutter posted this meme, and here are the seven she chose.
The first party I attended was a massive whiskey tasting, which was being held for a no-doubt-worthy charity whose name completely escapes me. For $25, you get a tour, of sorts; they ask you questions about your tastes, and then give you a sip of each of a bunch of bottles. Fortunately, I took notes, typing things in my treo as I tasted each one. (Typing has been cleaned up, and I've elaborated on a few entries. As you might imagine, the later ones became a bit sloppy.)
Pappy van Winkle smells almost too good to drink.
Talisker smells like a butterfly and stings like a big-ass wasp.
Auchentoshan smells like a rose garden and tastes like butterflies.
15-year Laphroaig is like my favorite trashy girlfriend, all grown-up and cultured.
Yamazaki is every stereotype about Japanese manners, grace, and elegance boiled down and capped in a bottle (with absolutely none of the stereotypes involving really awful porn).
Dalmore is even more gentle than Highland Park. At first, it seems to lack character and complexity, but it sneaks up on you. "Ha ha! I'm liquid crack, and now you're hooked!
Cragganmore is what Highland Park would be if it were made by people who bred orchids.
Black Bush is like regular Bushmill's, but better. I bet it would be awesome in coffee!
Eventually, I noticed that I was impaired, and recalled that I'd intended to watch what I drank at this con. When it was my turn for another taste of something, I asked the guide to pour about a third of what he'd poured me the last time, and told him I was a wussy lightweight. He agreed that he would need to cut me off soon, and my last few tastes were perhaps three or four millimeters in the bottom of a shotglass. He also made those last few count. Eventually, I thanked the hosts, went to my hotel room, took a leak, and drank several glasses of water. Then...
High Society
The next party I attended was a rather posh affair with tea, Turkish coffee (sadly without the foam, but thankfully without the grounds in the bottom of the cup), and various sweet stuff. Good stuff, all of it. Edmund may have been a treacherous prat, but I can definitely see why he liked that particular confection so much -- though personally, I preferred the baklava. I don't remember as much about this party -- more about the people I was chatting with than the party itself. Several interesting people, and I actually got to chat with them, where the tasting was a little too loud to really get to chat much.
High Notes
The third party was karaoke. This one was a small party, and not on the main party floor; someone saw me in a hallway and told me the room number, and there I went. Now, I have a few major disadvantages when it comes to popular music. One, I'm a bass, and most popular music is written for tenor. Two, if I must, I can reach notes above C4 (middle C), but I can't really hit them. And three, if I try to go from any note above C4 to any note below A3, or vice versa, my vocal cords play tricks on me. This limited my choice of songs a lot.
I could handle Billy Idol and David Bowie. U2 was harder, but I was able to do "With or without You" with little trouble. I had to drop an octave on Oingo Boingo. Apparently, though, I'm really not bad. I was thanked for showing up, profusely, the next day. The lady who ran this party assures me that next year, it will be much bigger, and she plans to have it on the party floor.
High Education
Another party had no alcohol, but it had killer conversation. I had about a half-hour chat with one gent there; we discussed mathematics, music theory, Indian music theory, and Unicode. (The last time I studied Unicode, it was limited to about 65 thousand characters. The standard has become much roomier since.) This same gent also has dreams of teaching calculus to kids in Elementary school, and by the time he finished explaining the methods he hopes to use, I was fully convinced that he could pull it off.
Once he left, I ended up discussing fan convention Urban Legends with a few other people. For instance, there's a story about a few people with a block of metallic Sodium, cutting off little specks and dropping them in the hotel swimming pool and watching them spark and dance on the surface. (Sodium reacts explosively with water. It also floats.) Then, someone dropped the whole block in, and reports vary, but either this turned the pool into a ten-story geyser, or shattered hundreds of windows facing the pool. (There are plenty of people who don't believe this one. The story about the guy dressed up in lots of peanut butter, however, is much better documented.)
I also ended up talking about pornography -- from technical and anthropological viewpoints -- with a few other people, without a single prurient thing about the conversation... and my dear god, we're such geeks!
This is why I love BayCon. The parties are great, sure. The costumes, yeah. But mostly, it's the ability to hang out, and let my hair down, with a couple thousand of my fellow geeks.
Evolutionary Psychology is an eeeen-teresting field. Don't get me wrong, I find the field interesting, but there does seem to be a lot of really questionable conjectures made in it, and it seems like any idiot can consider himself a potential expert in it. And while half the theories seem to have been pulled out of the asses of male researches who clearly need to get laid a lot more often, the other half are things that are so obvious one wonders why they even bothered publishing.
And occasionally, researchers take obvious observations, and from these draw some pretty bizarre conclusions, claiming to be edgy or provocative. You've seen this article, right? A couple of the theories might have had some basis in fact until researchers connected the dots from A to B, from B to C, and so on to about Q... not realizing that they were perhaps reading too much into F or K.
For instance, they claim that men like women with blond hair, small waists, and big tits because they like youth in general, and because all of these features tend to betray young women when they get older, by either fading, filling out, or sagging. Forgetting, for the moment, that this theory ignores a large percentage of the world population, for which blond hair tends not to exist at all... what they don't realize is that if this preference was as widespread as they think, it would itself represent a selective pressure, and women could quite possibly have adapted as a result, possibly by retaining these features for longer. Or each of these features could have slowly disappeared, forcing men to learn to judge other traits. Women evolve just as much as men do, after all, and just because a woman isn't twenty-one anymore doesn't mean she's out of the gene pool. (Especially since way back in history, humans tended not to live as long as we do now.)
Their other "truths about human nature" tend to make certain assumptions... chief among them that men tend to screw as many women as possible, and that women tend to be interested in men, but not sex so much. Perhaps my experience is a little unusual, but I've not found this to be so. Women have sex drives just as men do, if not higher -- in fact, sex may just be one of the reasons they put up with us. Some of these theories seem to have, as one of their underlying premises, that age-old belief that women like assholes.
Anyway... here's something I found from a different source: Women tend to like men with deep voices. Oh, and in other breaking news, water tends to be wet. As with the other article, this one explains in physiological terms how testosterone causes problems for men in high quantities, and that a low voice is the mark of someone who is both manly, and has survived all these problems. Oh, and it claims that such men tend to have more kids, which is where I start wondering about the methodology.
And all this time, I thought it was my hair! It turns out that I've been getting lucky because I can sing an E2 a ledger line below the bass staff!
Once upon a time, I tried to explain why red hair tends to make people, ahem... popular in adulthood. The theory I came up with was that red is the color of blood, and that subconsciously, a redhead appears to be a person who is using some of his own life force, possibly at a disadvantage to himself, in a frivolous display. If a person can survive to adulthood having done this for all his life, he obviously has plenty to spare.
Nice theory, huh? It sounds at least remotely plausible, and unlike all these other researchers, I'm actually willing to admit that I pulled this one out of my ass. Where's my Doctorate?
If your little girl eats or drinks soy products (like soy milk), she'll start menstruating while she's still watching Sesame Street¹. If your little boy eats or drinks soy products, it'll be much, much worse: he won't start puberty until he's out of High School, his genitals will be embarrassingly small, and worst of all...
(Insert the shrieking violins from the shower scene in Psycho.)
...he'll probably be GAY!!!
Oh, and soy also causes thyroid problems, obesity, breast cancer, childhood leukemia, infertility, and various other ills, but of course none of these problems compare to spending life as a pencil-necked queer with a small pee-pee!
And can you imagine what Sesame Street would be like then? Do we really need to see Count Von Count with his charming accent, as he teaches pubescent six-year-olds? "One! Two! Three! Three used tampons! Ah ah ah!" And let's not forget, he is a vampire. He can finish up his lesson by putting a kettle on for some tea...
Bastard Fairies!
A quirky little band who offers the entirety of one of their albums for free download. My personal favorite is track six.
"All you mormons who like cussing, you are going to hell! All you preachers who like fucking, you are going to hell! Little boys that choke the chicken, you are going to hell! It's the nature of evolution, the dinosaurs went to hell!"
From #1: "Hearsay ballooned into the most famous celebrity rumor in history when someone faxed dozens of Hollywood offices a fake ASPCA press release claiming that Gere had 'abused' a gerbil."
From #6: "Some have said that the rumor about Mick Jagger and David Bowie having an affair in the '70s was fueled by prurient homophobia. We prefer to think it became popular because it's fucking hot." (Personally, I disagree. David Bowie may be on my "guys I'd switch teams for" list, but Mick Jagger is definitely not. If that list exploded, Mick Jagger wouldn't hear the boom for at least two days.)
From #11: "In conclusion, arguments are strong on both sides of this important issue; judge for yourself. Incidentally, we're grateful for a job that allows us to spend hours Googling 'jamie lee curtis hermaphrodite'."
Sadly, nothing on Brandon Routh, either on his penis size (allegedly very big) or his orientation (allegedly very gay). Too bad. I knew someone on a web forum who claimed that Brandon Routh was all man, 100% straight, no cock for him, no sirree bob. It was so much fun to watch his head a splode the first time this topic came up.
You want a chance at the future's best? Here I am!
I'm tall, healthy (usually), slim, and athletic looking, I have a deep voice, and I have a big dick¹. I'm intelligent, I'm creative, and by most accounts, I'm attractive. Clearly, I'm of the future elite. Just ask Oliver Curry! He thinks that the highest of the social classes is all going to be favored by natural selection! Brains, body, looks, exaggerated sexual characteristics, one jackpot after another. And lemme tell you, the future of women is just as promising! Goodbye to that pesky body hair, hello to bigger breasts and lighter skin and those great big anime eyes... woo hoo!
Granted, that's only gonna be a few of us. The rest of humanity is going to turn into short, squat dullards. But hey, who cares about them? For the lucky few, the world is going to be a pretty, pretty place... and a small (but very well-proportioned) piece of that brave, sexy new world is here right now, in the form of myself!
Take a number, ladies². I'll get back to you as soon as I'm finished rereading The Time Machine, by H.G.Wells. I haven't read it in years, so I could be wrong... but this stupid bullshit sounds awfully familiar.
(For more smart-assery on this subject, check here at clairvoyantwank, here at anthropologist, and here at Pharyngula. And check back occasionally -- as with the breastfeeding icon frenzy, I expect this to explode all over the place, and I'll be updating this post. Repeatedly, in all likelihood.)
Of course I have a big dick. This is the interent. All guys have big dicks on the internet. We must all be from this future upper class!
No, don't really take a number. I'm slowing down for the time being, in that particular regard. More on this later, when I've wrapped better words around the reasons.
Holy cow, this is so cool! I want to get some of this stuff and blow bubbles and jump up and down on my bed! Just reading about this makes me feel like I'm ten years old, all of a sudden!
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silly