Quote of the Day:
“Cash is king; I just wish the king was bigger.’’ The Boston Globe ran a story on the number of people giving cash this holiday season rather than purchasing gifts; notably, a credit union in New Hampshire offered a “Black Friday” 3-month CD with a 10% return and sold 20 times the normal daily amount in about 4 hours.
I always enjoyed the cash/gift culture of Japan, where people give cash in beautifully decorated envelopes for weddings, funerals or for the New Year. I find it interesting that so many people are turning to thrift and saving right now — I wonder if it will last?
Photographs of a planet
I cannot emphasize how cool HiRISE stuff is or how amazing the photographs of Mars are; it makes me wonder how it would feel to step onto another planet; to see the sun and the stars in a completely different way; to live without our moon. I read a lot of fantasy/science fiction and I think that anyone who works with science or technology eventually has to think about these things (which could be why fantasy/science fiction is a stereotypical geek obsession). Thinking about walking on other planets, or there being life in another galaxy shakes up my world view; I once had a teacher ask me, what would aliens from another planet think of human sports like boxing? Would they stand, amazed, that humans would stand around and cheer people hitting each other? (He was a boxing fan) That idea got imprinted in my brain, and now I look at a lot of things that way — like hair. How would a being without hair see our occupation with hairstyles? Thinking about stuff like that can go on forever — it’s like going down a rabbit hole (Marti often regrets asking me what I’m thinking; the first time he asked, I said, “I’m thinking that if I could remake the world…” Who says he didn’t know what he was getting when he married me?).
Anyway, I love getting to work around the world of space and astronomy, and I thought I would give the PR guy a lift and post the YouTube video of recent stereo photographs of Mars on this site. It’s a fun video, complete with cheesy “space” music (if only they were playing tracks from Star Wars…oh, copyrights, how difficult you can make life sometimes!). You might not think seeing the mountains and valleys of Mars up close is quite as exciting as I do — which is why I’ve got this job, and you haven’t, it would seem — but on the other hand, it might give your spine a tingle. And who doesn’t like a little spine tingle now and again?
Socks
I found these babies @ Target and I bought them without knowing they hit the thigh so sexily. NOW FOR A SANTA OUTFIT TO MATCH — I’M LOOKING AT YOU, ANDRES HECTOR.
Humor takes the edge off
While I know I just went through several rants, I also know that most of them are just my extremely biased opinions. After all, there is not much I can do about changing the world — only about changing myself. I try to remember that, along with the Serenity Prayer, when I feel frustrated:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things that I can change;
And the wisdom to know the difference.
The other thing I do is laugh, and when Marti sent this to me — well, I laughed. And it made things better.
Spider Silk Textile
A couple of crackpots textile makers decided to try to weave a tapestry of spider silk, using over a million spiders (and a half million dollars of their own money — which means each spider was paid .50 for their work) (okay, okay — they didn’t pay the spiders).
I remember these golden orb weavers from Yoron, and my dear friend Mike, partner of Beth, one of my roommates in college, walked into one of their giant webs on an outing into the jungle/cemetery area of Yoron while visiting me. Since Beth had just picked up the lid of a curiously large pot buried in the ground — a pot that was, incidentally, full of human remains — and Mike started shrieking and running toward us, we all sat around and screamed for a few minutes. The spider, luckily, exited the scene, to all of our relief, and Beth re-consecrated the poor guy buried there by putting his lid back on, but seriously? Those are some freaking huge spiders.
Binary Birthday
You know, these days I spend quite a bit of time wondering about what I like to call “the engineering issue.” Here’s the thing: I always rode the rail between nerd and cool (or so I thought). I wasn’t quite smart enough to be a true nerd, but I was enough of a follower to attempt to be ‘cool’ in high school. In college, I wanted to gravitate entirely over to ‘cool,’ so I dropped engineering (8 hours of studying a day!) and transferred to English, which I could do with my eyes closed practically (and frequently did). My grades zoomed upward and all seemed well…ahem!…until I graduated and started looking for a job. And looking. And looking… That’s when I discovered all my friends taking jobs as secreta administrative assistants.
Now I find myself having gone full circle and back in the nerd world, and I realize…wow. This really suits me! I get the jokes! I like playing with computers all day! Even if I still use too many exclamation points! (I like to let the user know they’ve put something in that is ***wrong!!!! **** when I write code, which makes my supervisor a little crazy). Anyway, so for my birthday, we did nerdy things (like buy a new Wii controller) and I got a nerdy t-shirt (see below) and I suggested, to Marti’s delight, that we put candles on my cake in binary. Binary is the basic numbering system used by computers, and it goes like this: 00 (0) 01 (1) 10 (2) 11 (3) 100 (4) and so on…well, 34 is 00100010 using 8-bits (that means 8 spaces, which is typical for a computer chip and is why RAM is measured 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc). So we put 8 candles on, with the pink representing 0 and the blue representing 1:
And here I am, at 34 years old exactly:
(Where would I be had I stayed an engineer? Hard to say….)
Rant shi: The Biggest Red Herring Ever Perpetrated on the American People
#4: Global. Warming. Debate.
The global warming debate has got to be one of the most inane, worthless debates around right now. First off, let me just say — yes, I believe the earth’s atmosphere is in a warming trend, and I believe that the human population is responsible, and I’ve read James M. Inhofe’s articles and yes, I believe he is full of that stuff I keep finding smeared on my youngest child’s bum. However, and this is a big however, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you were to actually “prove” that global warming wasn’t true…get ready for it…I still wouldn’t give what the cat left in the litter box about it, because global warming is a giant red herring.
Yes! I said it! It’s a big, fat, debate about something that is very hard to prove, because science has a hard time proving negatives, scientists tend to disagree about data and methods, and a lot of money is floating around on both sides, yaddy yaddy yaddah. So, in my opinion, it is really a debate about nothing. But, you gasp, the Kyoto Protocol! The global warming treaty! Gasp! Gasp! US sovereignty gasp!
Get over it. Most big debates hide what the problem really is, and let’s face it — the problem is about pollution, about sustainability and lifestyle and the animals and plants and insects we share the planet with, and guess what? They’re dying. Maybe it’s from global warming, or over-fishing, or throwing trash into the gutters that go to the streams that make it into the oceans and kill the wildlife there, but the fact is we are stewards of this planet — stewards! Not children, using up our toys and throwing the broken pieces away.
I happen to know that some really, really beautiful things — including people — get destroyed by our urge to build and make lots of money to buy the car that shipped on the boat that came from the factory where nasty chemicals leached into the stream that poisoned the fish that poisoned the lady whose baby came out with no limbs. That is the debate we aren’t having because you know what? Nobody likes to face those realities, not the politicians whose campaigns are financed by industry, not the people who rely on the jobs in those factories to feed their families, not the general public who buy the goods made by those factories. This is the real debate, and I’m waiting to hear people stop arguing about which scientist is smarter and start finding some solutions. I’m at the front of the bandwagon for that party.
What I do see is endless debate about ridiculous ideas such as the loss of US sovereignty if we sign global warming treaties. Is anyone aware that we are involved in a lot of treaties? That there is a special office in the State Department that deals with treaty affairs? Did George W. Bush sign over our sovereignty when he signed the treaty to limit Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001? (More information on treaties here).
The thing about global warming is that it may possibly be (easily and cheaply) reversible using geoengineering, but reversing global warming is simply treating the symptoms and not the cause. Reversing the trend could have unintended consequences, but it still wouldn’t address the many other ecological problems we’re having right now, such as mass extinctions, habitat loss for animals, and of course, pollution. I see a lot of environmental groups using global warming as a catch-all, but the problem with this over-simplification is that then you get a war between two groups trying to over-simplify complicated questions that not only affect the United States, but every living thing on this planet. I really hope my children get to see the wonders I have seen, and I hope future generations understand that the idea of stewardship is more than rhetoric about an issue, but a fundamental responsibility we all have in taking care of our world.
We interrupt this scheduled ranting…
This Christmas, I am doing something I haven’t done before, even though I’ve tried: I’m making a lot of my gifts (hence the sewing machine research). I am NOT a crafty person; in fact, I HATE crafts, as anyone who worked with me in the Children’s Department at the library knows well. However, the engineer in me does like designing things, and I do sketch, write calligraphy (Asian and Roman) and whip up spa items from time to time. I also sew a bit, having started with the mega-project of sewing my own wedding dress (I’ll scan and post a pic later today). Anyway, I’m busy making gifts but I saw this post from GetRichSlowly, one of my favorite blogs, and I thought it was a great idea to pass on.
The Anti-Stuff Holiday Gift Guide
Meaningful, personal gifts
Anti-Stuff gifts aren’t necessarily gift cards, which often feel a bit impersonal. Think about what would be meaningful to the recipient. If your sister is a busy mom, give her a couple of hours of babysitting and an appointment with a masseuse. Consider the following to generate anti-Stuff gift ideas unique to each loved one:
- Hobbies
- Lifestyle (parent, student, on-the-go, homebody…)
- Anything he or she has “always wanted to do”
Word of warning: make sure the gift is something the recipient would enjoy or something in which he or she has expressed interest, not something you like or think he or she should like! That holds true with any sort of gift-giving.
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Read the rest at GetRichSlowly