back by [redacted] request

what is matthew cooper good for?

and, just for fun, what about Sam.

and Australia!

duck duck duck goose

So, media abounds here.

I hope you all checked out the cell thing, which was amazing. The walking dealies are dyenins walking along microtubules. It is actually how they work.

And you could see the "icebergs" floating in the membrane sea! history coming alive!

anyway, the brits are great, which I have tried to tell you again and again. Colin sent me this series. Educational and historical.

And nick sent these: Part 1 Part 2.

Yesterday, tippi, vanessa, kersten and I got drunk and then went and photocopied amazing ads and articles from the 1920s to the 1960s to be used as wall decoration. So great. I wish I had a scanner.

Sam: one of them is a picture of a medical school dissection lab (for women med students only) with a number of tables each with 4 students and a cadaver, the students deep in concentration. Unfortunately, the most prominant thing in the photo is a smiling skeleton, right in the forefront and dominating the entire right half of the photo, watching the women doctors. It is hilarious.

And, of course, numerous cigarette (spelled cigaret) ads explaining just how good they are for you.

My potential favorite: biochemistry explained via something that looks suspiciously like Lite-Brite.

cells rule, and other things

see this.

also, check out the wiki post on Howard Hughes, especially the part about Dummar at the end.

why?

as I rode home today I passed a mid-aged couple walking their dog wearing reflective vests and carrying a powerful flashlight, which was on. Issue: it was light out. Why?

Why do so many people have problems with the word "definitely?" It is not definately.

Chris and wife had their baby today. Congratulations. I want my cigar.

I wrote a story.

I think I lied ... I am totally sick of applications.

anyway, I wrote a story. What think you?

He surveyed the landscape below, a reconnaissance scout preceding his unit. His perch was unsteady, the path to it unsound, but he was capable and surefooted.

In the distance, light glinting off the flasks of his companions made obvious their position. Far in the other direction lay their destination, their home. In between, an assortment of perils, a mosaic of uncertainty.

He took it in, the totality of the landscape, committing it to memory, before gingerly descending the sheer cliff face.

Reuniting with his group, he conferred with the commander, who in turn readied the men. They were a proud group, but the brutality of their toils was obvious - clothing barely held together on scarred frames, breath coming raggedly through parched lips on drawn taut faces. Home signified this journey’s end and their arrival could not come quickly enough.

He had not always been the scout. The first scout vanished and, initially, no one was willing to take his place. Nor, really, should they have – the unit was efficient, each man utterly capable in his crucial job. It became obvious, though, as injuries increased and progress slowed, that the unit required a replacement.

After days of deep consideration, he volunteered. It was frightening to leave the unit, however briefly, but that fear had to be conquered. He would never admit to a certain pleasure felt atop a hard-found vantage point.

Readied, the group moved slowly forward, guided past peril, towards the embrace of the home they so greatly longed for.

difficile

i am hitting that last year rut, one and a half months in to the new year.

oh no!

I assume I will persevere, but wow, working for those 8 months was much more fun. right now, this is a tad tedious. maybe, just maybe, it is being chained to my computer that is annoying. I just can't put my finger on it.

news: i want to make a classical version of sexyback, so I can feel less bad singing it in the shower (note: I must stop listening to BBC dance). which leads me to the belief that I can probably classy anything up so that it is fit for consumption. I will be the richard gere of the everything world.

justice via justices

For a class, I have been reading some cases that have been sent to the U.S. Supreme Court. What is interesting to read are the dissenting opinions where the justices rip into the court's overall decision. Below is a part of Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion on the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the death sentence imposed on a (allegedly) retarded man convicted of murder.

But the Prize for the Court's Most Feeble Effort to fabricate "national consensus" must go to its appeal (deservedly relegated to a footnote) to the views of assorted professional and religious organizations, members of the so-called "world community," and respondents to opinion polls. Ante, at 11-12, n. 21. I agree with the Chief Jus-tice, ante, at 4-8 (dissenting opinion), that the views of professional and religious organizations and the results of opinion polls are irrelevant.6 Equally irrelevant are the practices of the "world community," whose notions of justice are (thankfully) not always those of our people. "We must never forget that it is a Constitution for the United States of America that we are expounding. ... [W]here there is not first a settled consensus among our own people, the views of other nations, however enlightened the Justices of this Court may think them to be, cannot be imposed upon Americans through the Constitution."

What an ass. Most of his dissent revolves around the development of the national consensus, which he admittedly tears down quite well, but this section and the complete lack of regard he holds for the world community is scary to be seen in a justice of the supreme court. Why throw in that "thankfully"?

oh, to be young again.

The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.

So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

I wish I had seen this a few years ago, like before entering co-op.

ode to wikipedia

you, sir, are the single greatest invention to come from the internet. even better than skype.

what else is there? I guess the ability to hear music that you would not have the opportunity to hear otherwise is pretty good, but you have to surpress your morals to do so - or make arguments that seem to make sense.

anything else? commercial free television? arts and letters daily? youtube glimpses into the retarded lives of everyone from 12 - 35?

all lose to the amazing collective knowledge, the easily searchable brain, that is wikipedia.

i love you wikipedia.