from the puma online store website:
continue for the full version…
and you thought you had escaped from the attack of the robot monkey articles? muahahaha!
01:00 PM Oct. 26, 2004 PT
If a monkey is hungry but has his arms pinned, there’s not much he can do about it. Unless that monkey can control a nearby robotic arm with his brain.
This time lapse photo shows a lab monkey at the University of Pittsburgh using a robotic arm to feed itself. The prosthetic limb, the size of a child’s arm, has working shoulder and elbow joints and is equipped with a simple gripper to grasp and hold food.
And that’s exactly what the monkey in Andrew Schwartz’s neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh can do, feeding himself using a prosthetic arm controlled solely by his thoughts.
…
The prosthetic limb, the size of a child’s arm, has working shoulder and elbow joints and is equipped with a simple gripper to grasp and hold food. The monkey’s arms are restrained at its sides and as the monkey thinks about bringing the food to his mouth, electrodes in the monkey’s brain intercept the neuronal firings that are taking place in the motor cortex, a region of the brain responsible for voluntary movement.
The brain activity is fed to a computer where an algorithm developed by the University of Pittsburgh interprets the neuronal messages and sends them to the robotic arm. “We have learned to understand the patterns of firing rates and can decode them into movement, direction, velocity and speed,” said Schwartz.
…
The unique aspect of Schwartz’s research is that he conducted what is known as “closed loop” brain experiments. In a “closed loop” experiment, the monkey is conscious of the robotic arm and is making an effort to control it.
it’s the same thing. i think that i’ve gotten out of halloween, and then hmc changes something at the last minute, and suddenly i haven’t gotten out of halloween, and i’m scrambling for a costume. this year i thought i was totally covered. i was going to be in lost angels this weekend, and then fly up sunday night, since i’m going to be in sunnyvale for training all next week. even when hmc was talking about flying up here instead, i thought i was still safe, as she would have to fly back down on sunday to get to work early monday. alas, it’s all a big trick. on me. she’s up here this weekend, flying back on monday morning, which she can do because they’ve wrapped shooting and she no longer has to go in super early.
and so once again, i’m stuck without a costume, and without a place to go, having blisfully deleted all halloween party notices. although it’s not like there aren’t good costume ideas out there.
at the very least, it’ll be nice to have her back up here. maybe she can remember that it’s not so stinky in sf after all. although i’ll have to go out and get things like food to make it look like i have things like food all the time. which of course i do.
also, we can finally go see the yoshimoto nara exhibit down at the san jose museum of art, which closes on sunday! hooray! you should come, too. it’ll be a art party!
oh, and yes, my email seemed to be bouncing yesterday. intermittently. i switched some things around to compensate so everything should be fine. you can, uh, email me if it’s not working.
i’ve been avoiding talking about this for a while, which has been easy when there are things like robot brains and elections going on, but i might as well get around to it.
last weekend was pretty hard for me, on a couple of aspects, both relating to just where i am and where the hell am i going to be?
first, on friday i went to have dinner with two couples that have been long time friends of mine but whom i really haven’t seen much of in the past few years. one couple sort of vanished once they moved out to albany, and now they’re mired in having a baby and becoming totally suburban (to think that these were the punk rock kids i used to know!). the other couple moved out to new york, moved back, but now it turns out they’re set on moving out of the bay area completely, opting for north carolina to raise a family.
now child-rearing is all fine and good (viz, ro), but i think it’s more the mentality that was being expressed around it. they were talking about how people have all these ideals and goals when they’re younger, but when you get to be about 30something, you’re like, “is that all that there is?” maybe you haven’t achieved the great things that you hoped for, and now you’re left with changing your goals or settling for raising kids and living through that. which is fine, since do you really want to be a secret agent rock star diplomat anymore? but hearing it from them, it just sounded so depressing, as if they were giving up on themselves and had turned into mere caretakers for the next generation.
the other thing that happened was that i went to the monthly meeting of our spiritual community, and one of the topics ostensibly was to talk about the spiritual direction of that community. this was very interesting to me, as i had been feeling that it had been decidedly less spiritual in the past year or so, and i was hoping to seek clarity and reaffirmation in that respect. instead, it ended being a little mastubatory, in that “we’re great, this is great, we’re wonderful in so many ways.” ok, so that’s just me being harsh, but often there’s this tyranny of niceness, where everyone says great and reaffirming things, that it doesn’t leave space for people who don’t feel the same way or aren’t feeling reaffirmed and energized by what’s going on.
and maybe it’s just possible that whatever’s going on just no longer speaks to me in the same way that it did. perhaps the community is moving in a different direction than i am, and that maybe is fine. and i know a large part of it is, “you get out of it what you put into it,” and i haven’t put a lot into it in the past year. after the trauma with the church and getting off the council, i’ve really kept out of it. because i just couldn’t anymore. burnt out doesn’t even come close to describing it. and then of course there’s the whole thing where i just don’t know if i’m going to have to move to LA, meaning i can’t engage long term because i don’t know if i’m going to be around.
anyway, it’s all very confusing and rambling, i know, and i’m sorry about that. but all of this stuff is going on in my head and won’t come out. just trying to figure out where i’m supposed to be. or not.
anyway, the curse is over! the dreaded curse of baseball on tv is finally over! basketball season starts next week, and will make everything better. ahhh opiate…
so if you’re not ready to be a brain in a jar, apparently we’re well on our way to replacing our brains with computers:
The microchip, designed to model a part of the brain called the hippocampus, has been used successfully to replace a neural circuit in slices of rat brain tissue kept alive in a dish. The prosthesis will soon be ready for testing in animals.
…
To achieve their result, Theodore Berger and his colleagues at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, US, had to develop a system that would “read” real neural signals from healthy tissue, process them just as the lost brain tissue should, and pass on the resulting signals to the next brain area.
The brain region they are trying to replace is the hippocampus, which is vital for forming memories. The hippocampus has a well-understood three-part circuit. It also has a regular repeating structure, so elements of all three parts of the hippocampal circuit can be kept in a fully functional state, even in small slices in a culture dish.
In previous work, Berger’s team had recorded exactly what biological signals were being produced in the central part of the hippocampal circuit and had made a mathematical model to mimic its activity. They then programmed the model onto a microchip, roughly 2 millimetres square (New Scientist, 12 March 2003).
Now the team has tested whether its chip can work like the real thing. They cut out the central part of the circuit in real rat brain slices and used a grid of miniature electrodes to feed signals in and out of their microchip. “We asked if output from an intact slice was the same as from a slice with the substituted chip,” says Berger. “The answer was yes. It works really well.”
The signals produced by the intact brain slice and the prosthetic hippocampus matched in shape, timing and statistics, the team revealed at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego on Sunday.
“It proves you can take out a piece of a central brain region - a piece with real clinical interest - replace it with a chip, and get it to operate as it did before,” said Berger.
The team are now working towards testing their prosthetic device on a live rat, which they expect to do within three years. They are also developing a mathematical model of primate hippocampal activity, so that they can eventually move on to testing the device in monkeys.
and to think you sometime worry about losing your keys:
and yes, that does read tons.
big article in the ny times sunday magazine about the polar express, and all the trouble it caused. or how wonderful technology is in ruining lives. or making movies. something like that:
There was little that resembled a traditional shoot at a warehouse in Culver City, Calif., where the film was being made in April. In place of a soundstage, there was a domelike structure built of scaffolding that surrounded a playing area roughly 10 feet square. Attached to the scaffolding were several dozen infrared sensors, which could pick up and digitally record the light bounced back by the dozens of small reflectors on Mr. Hanks’s black bodysuit, as well as by the 150 smaller reflectors attached to his facial muscles. With his face dotted by the tiny jewels, as the crew called the reflectors, Mr. Hanks looked like the pincushion man from the “Hellraiser” series. But after a few days of working with the reflectors attached, he said, he no longer noticed them.
…
When Mr. Hanks entered the playing space - “the volume,” as Mr. Zemeckis likes to call it - his movements were recorded by a computer as points of light floating in a dark three-dimensional space. Even in this raw form, the connect-the-dots figure moving on the computer monitor was recognizably Mr. Hanks. It walked like him, gestured like him and, most important, crinkled and smiled and frowned like him.
Filmmakers have been able to capture full-body motion for some years using a process called mo-cap, in which a computer scans sensors attached to a performer’s limbs and records the broad outlines of movements. “It’s been around a long time from video games,” Mr. Zemeckis explained. “They put sensors on the athletes for sports games and things like that.”
The great leap of “The Polar Express” came in the ability to capture facial expressions: “When we did the first tests,” Mr. Zemeckis said, “we had Tom do the body acting, and then we put him into a space where he sat in a chair and had to re-act everything from the neck up. I said, ‘You can’t do a movie like this.’ So they went back and were able to figure out how to get both sets of sensors working at the same time. And once we started the movie, the technology kept getting better.”
oops. i realized yesterday while talking to bp about his sex cult, that when i moved my website, while i updated the main page with a “i’ve moved” page, i never updated the rss feed. so if you were subscribed to just the feed and never go to the actual site (which i do myself for most blogs, thanks bloglines!), you’d just think i dropped off the face of the earth.
so i hacked a fake rss feed so now they know. and they should end up here. hopefully.
you’re now only 33 posts behind!
eh, it’s not that important. but there will be a test.
oops, make that 34.
(yes, this post does contain basketball-related content. thus xz: “bring. it. on.”)
i watched my first preseason nba games of the season on tnt and tbs today, tivoed from yesterday. first it was miami vs. atlanta, who i think they’re obligated to show on tv at least once a year since turner has its hq in atlanta. otherwise, why would anyone show such a wrecthed team? as for miami, shaq looks good, leaner, fitter, and definitely motivated. it’s weird seeing him in black, although he’s now got his old number, 32, back.
as for the second game, it was the lakers vs. the clippers. kobe looked pretty good, although he had a lot of plays where he was trying to do something fantastic but couldn’t quite follow through. it could be preseason legs, but i feel that the whole season’s going to be watching kobe chuck a lot of shots and hope that most of them go in. no season tickets this year, as i don’t know where we’ll be. i do miss those laker girls, though.
it did sound like they were trying to use voice over ip for broadcasting the games, because frequently during the game the commentary would break off in a stutter effect and then come back on. which is exactly how my voip service sounds like when i’m on a call and my computer’s downloading something fierce. they’re supposed to have quality of service features to prevent this and prioritize this, but i don’t think they work that well, as kurtis has another voip provider and he gets the same experience.
i did see that my dsl provider, speakeasy, is now starting their own voip service. they claim that because they own the dsl, they can actually do effective QoS so you won’t get the stutter. but who knows? do i really want to switch everything around just to see? not really.
i’m actually a litte more excited about their onelink service, which allows me to have a dedicated dsl line without having to keep a phone line active. but am i really confident (foolish) enough to cut all the cords?
maybe if i lived in taiwan and had nationwide wifi as a backup…
there’s a word that keeps popping through my head today. over and over again, it’s somehow infectious and it won’t stop.
shmickmak!
it’s sharp and rambunctious. like squealed by a duck. distressingly enough, it seems to rhyme with gilbert godfried’s aflac duck.
shmickmak! shmickmak!
entirely unrelated, the other big though that’s going through my head today is…
spam prevention idea #36: since domain names are so cheap, why not buy a domain name just for use on commerce websites?
i normally just use some form of spam-blahdeblah@sassyass.net when creating an account on whatever commerce website or anything else that i need to create an account on. that way i know where the spam is coming from, and how they got my address in the first place. but hell, why not just get a whole new domain name, and just separate your personal email from anything you could get spam from once and for all? all your mailing lists, shopping, whatever goes to blahdeblah@disposabledomain.com, and you can just chuck the whole thing if/when it gets inundated with spam.
itunes@shmickmak.com. see?
finally, is seems like the university of florida is not just a football/party school after all:
Oct. 21, 2004
GAINESVILLE, Fla. —- A University of Florida scientist has grown a living “brain” that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.
The “brain” — a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish — gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene.
…
DeMarse experimental “brain” interacts with an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator through a specially designed plate called a multi-electrode array and a common desktop computer.
“It’s essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom,” DeMarse said. “Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network – a brain.”
The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said.
When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”
To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane’s controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.
“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”
this is really creepy. brain in a jar, folks. this reminds me of that one stanislaw lem story (i think it was a pirx the pilot one) where he finds a scientist that has given his wife eternal life: he’s put her mind in a little box that will exist forever. only he didn’t give her any inputs or outputs, so it’s just consciousness in a void. horrific!
and of course there’s the thing where we coud all be brains in vats, with electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom, interacting with one another through a simulator. the matrix? that’s too good for you. who says you even have a body, sucker?
shmickmak!
October 21, 2004
TAIPEI (AFP) - Nike was fined one million Taiwan dollars (29,500 USD) after fans got to see basketball superstar Michael Jordan for just 90 seconds during a whirlwind promotional visit to the island, officials said.
The US sportswear giant’s Taiwan branch was found to have violated fair trade law by Jordan’s May trip, after which furious fans complained they had splashed out on Nike products to gain entry to the event called “The Show”.
“Nike (Taiwan) had publicized an hour-long special event with a five-minute public appearance of Jordan. But that 90-second (appearance) was obviously far from proportional principle,” said Chen Chi-yuan, vice chairman of the Fair Trade Commission.
Sales of Jordan line products jumped six-fold between May 7-16 as Nike’s promotional campaign “successfully created the impression among consumers that owning a Jordan product equates owning celebrity quality”, the commission said.
“Nike Taiwan was found violating the fair trade law because its promotion of ‘The Show’ was proved to have affected the market order,” Chen said.
Nike Taiwan declined to comment on the commission’s ruling, saying it had yet to receive the formal notice.
The company apologized after the fans protested and offered refunds to customers as a local consumer group threatened to launch a boycott of its products.
Jordan arrived in Taiwan on May 21 for a visit lasting less than 24 hours as part of an Asian promotional tour. Some 700 fans were admitted to “The Show” at the Taipei World Trade Center.
i don’t know why people keep trying to get me to go to conferences about silly things like philosophy or ways to save the earth or make our society a better place for everyone. why would i bother with any of that nonsense when there are things like In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage, a scholarly conference on godzilla and it’s effect on society:
i watched super size me this weekend and i have to say that it shared the shit out of me. not that i ever really eat fast food, and certainly not mcdonald’s, but just seeing what fast food can do to a person’s body just puts the fear into me that everything we’re eating is potentially scary and horrific. if he was killing his liver with that high-fat diet, who knows what we’re unwillingly unleashing on our poor kidneys and livers?
the most frightening thing was the little short in the extras where they took various mcdonald’s burgers and then one from a real restaurant, and watched them decay over several weeks. you saw how the regular one got moldy after just a week, but how some of the mcdonald’s ones almost wouldn’t break down even after several weeks. and the scariest thing of all was that the french fries didn’t break down at all. they didn’t get moldy or anything. five weeks later, they looked like they could have been a day old, just a little soggy. how fucked up is that?
maybe this is just desserts since i’ve been all haughty about this whole raw food movement and all of those damn raw food restaurants that are popping up around the city. and now seeing this, who knows? maybe raw food is the only way to go to get something that won’t fuck you up?
i think that super size me along with the body worlds exhibit has just underlined for me the myriad of things that can go wrong with your body (tumors, melanomas, growths, etc.), just how incredibly fragile we are, and how improbable it is that we even function as living organisms. now i’m afraid that any little thing will send it all crashing down.
so now i’m suspicious of all food. everything. not that i eat that much anyway, but maybe that’s for the best. what you don’t eat can’t hurt you.
i’m loathe to post about politics because i’m loathe to talk about politics, so this will be quick:
we went to the body worlds exhibit at the california science center down at usc today, which was pretty fantastic. it’s an in-depth examination of the body and all its systems, which sounds pretty standard fare, except for the fact that they’re using real dead bodies which have been preserved and sliced up for your viewing pleasure using the technique of plastination, which basically turns various parts of the body to solid plastic. so you get someone’s entire circulatory system and nothing else, for example.
the craziest parts were where they had entire bodies posed with their muscles still attached but splayed out in different ways, as if your muscles had exploded off your body and were trying to furiously escape. oh, and maybe if you had been cut in half as well.
go see this exhibit! it requires a trip to los angeles, but you can maybe visit hmc as well. it’ll be there through january, but it it’s the only stop on the west coast so it’s not like you have much of a choice.
plus, after you’re done, you can go watch the horror movie version as well: anatomy starring franka potente!
i’m not so sold on the google desktop yet, although it is cool to be able to google your computer and email. but i’ve got x1 installed and the interface is a little nicer.
however, this fucking rocks. google sms. you can now text google from your cell phone and get local listings, prices, dictionary definitions, and general facts.
this is fantastic!
i look around at the house that hmc’s staying in, and i’m floored. it’s just so spacious. there’s just so much room. and that’s just the downstairs that she’s living in, this doesn’t even take into account the much huger upstairs part of the house.
well, ok, this is los angeles, which means you’re living in the world’s largest suburb, so of course things are going to be big and spacious. that’s the trade-off for not being able to walk anywhere to get a cup of coffee or a great meal at a nearby restaurant: space. space means that things are away from you, but then when you want things, you have to go to where they are.
the other side effect of having so much space is that all of hmc’s things don’t look so cluttered and imposing when they’re spread out over such a wide area. as opposed to at home, where our stuff is jammed into a little (but very cool and cute) apartment. but i do think and wonder, “where the hell is all of this stuff going to go when (if) she moves back home?”
maybe i should just break down and rent a storage space like she’s been pestering me to for the past, uh, forever. but i’m of the mind that people should just own less things. if you don’t have room for it, get rid of it! if you can’t even see it or use it every day, why even have it? for what? for when?
it’s like moving all over again, which is basically paying for your own stuff again, just in a different place. this is even worse, because you’re literally paying for your own stuff to be in a different place. and it never ends! it’s just an excuse to keep more crap.
but what’s the alternative? i’ve already missed my window of opportunity to secretly sell stuff while she was away. she’s already caught onto that plan and has started taking mental inventory of all the things i’ve been eyeing.
i still haven’t unloaded the land cruiser from four weeks ago when i drove a lot of hmc’s stuff back up because i can’t figure out where it’s all going to go. there’s some creative packing i can do, but it’ll be tight. and meanwhile, all that stuff in the land cruiser makes it hard to actually sell the land cruiser.
anyone want to buy a land cruiser with lots of cool stuff in it?
from my favorite comic diary american elf:
(if you haven’t read his stuff, it’s pretty great. there’s now a whole compilation of his comic diary for the last five years(!!) in one volume. also, don’t forget monkey vs. robot, and my favorite, peanutbutter and jeremy!)
from the economist:
The Amish tend to shun newfangled things—electricity, cars, modern clothes, presidential politics. Only about one in ten vote. But their conservative Christian values and suspicion of big government make them natural adherents of the right. As the Amish put it, “We don’t vote, but we pray Republican.”
Republicans have been courting the Amish in the battleground states of Pennsylvania (where there are 50,000 of them) and Ohio (54,000). The election boards in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Holmes County, Ohio, have seen a surge in Amish names among those registering to vote. If even a few thousand of them were to horse-and-buggy it to the polls in either state on election day, it could make all the difference to George Bush in a neck-and-neck race.
The president met privately with a small group of Amish in Lancaster County in July. Ever since, the local party faithful have been chasing the Amish vote, even offering to drive them to the polls.
…
The Amish seem to feel that one of their own is in the White House. “He comes from the old school,” one says. Mr Bush’s foreign wars do not accord with Amish pacifism, but his religious conviction and his stance on social issues have got their hearts aflutter. They see gay marriage as an affront to their way of life; the president’s opposition to abortion “puts warm circles around our hearts”. Even Mr Bush’s wild past resonates: Amish teenagers are known to sow their oats before returning to the church.
…
As with many other Americans, voting is not always a priority. November is the Amish wedding season, and election day falls on a popular day to get married. “If I hitch my horse there at the wedding,” one man complains, “there’s no way I’m going to make it all the way back to vote.”
i’m guessing that if they put in a few touch-screen voting booths in ohio then this will become a moot point.
(all quotes replaced with exerpts of spam i received today.)
TEMPE, Ariz. - Sen. John Kerry said Wednesday night that President Bush bears responsibility for a misguided war in Iraq, lost jobs at home and mounting millions without health care. Bush tagged his Democratic rival as a lifelong liberal bent on raising taxes and government spending.
“Soft Viagra, Zyban, Zyban, Levitra, Soft Viagra, Soft Viagra and more!” Bush said in the final debate of a close and contentious campaign for the White House. “Who calls himself Canadian calls himself French; and, little communicative as Ned Land was, I must admit that he took a certain liking for me!!!”
Undeterred, the Democratic challenger said many of the nation’s ills can be laid at Bush’s feet.
He “recently received the application and your re f i nance request was approved with $503 sav i ng compared to your current montly payment” in Iraq, Kerry said, and the country is less safe as a result. He said 11 consecutive presidents, Republicans and Democrats alike, have been hit with recession and war, yet “Your E-mail attached to ticket number 56739-1 with serial number 928098-0 drew the lucky numbers of 2-6-9 which consequently won the lottery in the 2nd category.”
As for health care, the Democratic senator said, 5 million Americans have lost coverage under Bush’s watch. “These pills are just like regular Vìagra but they are specially formulated to be soft and dissolvable under the tongue. The pill is absorbed at the mouth and enters the bloodstream directly instead of going through the stomach. This results in a faster more powerful effect which lasts as long as the normal,” Kerry said.
i watched the debate, and it was pretty much about as informative as this.
someone at work just freaked out today.
i wasn’t there, but on a support call with the customer, apparently he just freaked out. couldn’t handle it, just hung up, and left. and now he’s m.i.a.
it’s not that we didn’t see this coming; he’s been on and off unhappy for a while now, and a few months ago he tried to leave for another position in the company before he was persuaded to stay. it’s funny, i was thinking about him just last week, and wondering how he was, since nothing had really changed and he was still in basically the same conditions.
but even if he came back now, would we want him back?
all of a sudden, it’s like the whole ricky williams situation. for those of you who thankfully don’t follow football, he was a top-5 running back who decided to retire at the peak of his abilities, just a week before training camp this year. he was the center of the franchise and basically the whole offense for the miami dolphins. and yet he walks away, leaving his team in the lurch.
or maybe it’s like barry sanders. the best running back the detroit lions ever had, and possibly the best running back ever, he was the saviour of the franchise when i was growing up. he did incredible, crazy things. he could break defenders’ ankles with one of his double juke moves. he had the sad sack lions one game away from the super bowl. and yet at the top of his career, on the verge of breaking the rushing record, he retires. he says that he’s lost his love of the game, and that he’s tired of losing. i used to love him. but now i can’t. because he betrayed us.
i guess ultimately, you can’t keep people doing what they don’t want to be doing. they got to love it to do a good job, even if they’re the most talented people for the position.
because you need someone you can depend on and who won’t run out on you. the most talented person in the world can’t help you if he’s not there.
just ask keyshawn johnson.
on a lighter note, my parents called me last night and wanted to remind me to make sure to make my own babies. in other words, don’t go around adopting chinese babies, but make (half) taiwanese ones. because apparently some taiwanese couples my age are doing just that, adopting chinese babies. because chinese babies are easy to get. they come in cracker jack boxes. or in vending machines.
on the other hand, what a better way for taiwan to take over china, right? first, take all of their babies, and make them taiwanese. and then you get the women. and then you get the money. and then you get the power!
isn’t that how scarface worked too?
chinese babies, baby.
it’s all up in the air again.
if you asked me a month ago, i would have said that it’s 80% sure that hmc is moving back to sf. but now, it’s maybe 60%. or even 50%.
now that it’s getting closer and closer to being real, she’s freaking out about what it actually means to move back. and to her, it means (in her mind) giving up her career, throwing away all the work of the past few years, and starting all over.
whether this is actually true, who knows? sure, there are a bunch of visual effects houses up here that she could apply to, and i even recall people telling me they had contacts there that could possibly help out. (if only i remembered who they were. bad memory! bad! bad!) and there’s also the bigger issue of whether sony imageworks is even the place for her, as she was truly miserable for the past year and a half working on polar express (coming to a theatre near you on nov 10!). but who knows whether it was just that job or imageworks in general? although word on the street is that imageworks is craaaazy.
so we’re left in this limbo state of both of us being in separate places, wanting to be with the other one, but not wanting to have to make the call and tell the other person to give up everything and possibly ruin all they’ve built up.
i told hmc to talk to the producer and tell her that it’s possible that she would be able to stay on, and if so, what would that mean.
because it can’t go on this way. we’re really tired of it, honestly.
and no, it doesn’t necessarily make sense. but since when does anything make sense?
this from the bbc: Video game skills and a good poker face online are becoming essential job qualifications in the financial markets, with recruitment drives assessing potential star traders in online gaming exams.
“You’ve obviously got to be cool under pressure” said one trader, “and mentally alert. But I wouldn’t have thought training people on GameBoys would help you down there.”
But those game skills, developed despite parental fears for their offspring’s social development, are exactly what is required for a lucrative future on the digital trading floor.
At Geneva Trading, based in Chicago, they train up students to make money out of anything from Brent crude to precious metals and pork bellies.
But as the company’s president, Mary McDonnell told the BBC Go Digital programme, they are looking for recruits with a new generation of job skills.
“It is unlikely that we would hire someone who didn’t show good proficiency at a GameBoy or online poker or similar video-type game where hand-to-eye coordination is important” she said.
The company follows small fluctuations in the market, easily missed on a bank of trading screens filled with fast moving numbers. Here, traders use mouse clicks to buy or sell.
The faster their reaction the more money they can make, which is where the video games skills come in.
This new job requirement is part of a trend throughout the financial sector, with some trader training courses offering an online gaming component.
For Geneva Trading and other similar firms, expertise in online poker is another star-quality in potential recruits.
“It’s the discipline of not getting too emotional about your transactions, and also the mathematical ability to keep track of numbers, as in card counting,” said Ms McDonnell.
“Online poker practice helps traders to read the markets correctly.
“It helps to determine if people are bluffing, trying to make the market move one way or another,” she said.
feel free to buy me a gameboy advance sp or even a nice little gameboy ds if you want me to start honing the skills to make us millions of dollars!
finally back from austin.
all i can say is that i’m really fucking tired of steak. you can get vegetables on the side, but they’re usually creamed or blanched flavorless. there’s always the salad, which is inevitably a quarter of an iceberg lettuce drenched with blue cheese dressing. as an alternative, i ordered a tomato salad one night, which was a beefsteak tomato sliced… drenched with blue cheese dressing. yum! i do have to admit that the steaks were on the whole damn good. there was one boneless cajun ribeye which was pretty fantastic. although there was another ribeye marinated in jim beam, which was a little questionable.
and we won’t talk about the local hooter’s-type franchise that featured bbq served up by skinny scantily-clad waitresses with shirts zipped down to here. did i mention that it was called bone daddy’s?
and we certainly won’t talk about that strip club whose motto may have been “home of the short and squat”. sure, it was a tuesday, but come on. there are standards, people!
all in all, it was a good business trip, but i’m glad to be back. i went over to w’s today and had a nice raw food salad, which was a yummy change.
the job ended up taking an extra day, but that was pretty much out of our hands. on the down side, the extra day meant that i got home exactly two hours too late to not get a street cleaning ticket on my car. i suppose it was worth it, as the president of the company called me to congratulate me on a job well done. i guess that’s a better impression than him remembering sitting next to me at president’s club last year and watching me fumbling with my bacon which i was too nervous to eat with my hands, right?
now i can go back to sleep.
i’m in austin this week. not in taiwan. which is fine, except that i’m still in austin.
no, actually, austin’s quite nice. i was going to post earlier today about how austin was strange, but then my browser crashed, perhaps as a sign. austin’s great! it’s texas that’s strange. but don’t mess with texas, right?
i was told that austin is the live music capital of the world. i’m not sure how they award that, if there’s some sort of competition, or pageant with a swimsuit competition, or of all the other live music cities come together and have a vote at their annual meeting or what. impressively to back up this claim, austin does have sxsw and austin city limits. however, i was also told that austin is the tattoo capital of the world as well, so i don’t know. but if i come home with charlie brown on my ass, then you’ll know.
we did go out to a bunch of bars, and did see several live bands, which were pretty good. so i guess empirical evidence does seem to bear this claim out, albeit with a statistically small sample.
i do sort of feel like i’m the wrong person in the wrong place, though. it’s a great city for music, but i feel like i’ve become too much of an electronica fiend to appreciate it. i was even in austin’s premiere music store, waterloo records, and i just didn’t find that much because they’re really targeting someone else. it’s like when hmc and jo were in london a few years ago, and jo wanted to hear some “acoustic folky music” in one of the electronic music capitals of the world.
there’s either no place like home, or i sold my soul to non-rock and roll.
what can i say about chicago and pj harvey?
i love them both.
i had a great time going out there to see the other rachel, and i got to go see her live in action as a brand new art student at the university of chicago. it reminded me that there are these little worlds out there, for example this little world which consists of the art department at uofc, where everything is self contained and hyperimportant to the people in that world, but if you’re not involved in it, you don’t even think about it of know it exists. to the rest of the uofc it’s just the crazy old building without wireless on the edge of campus. and to the rest of chicago, it’s just that part of town where uofc is. and to the rest of the country, it’s just chicago, right?
i also got to meet rachel’s cousin lixian finally. it’s almost like i’ve already known her, as rachel’s been telling me about her and her about me for years, and we even went and visited her in hong kong back in the day (although we ended up missing her). but she’s also going to uofc, as an undergrad, and it was great to finally see how adorable she is in person. plus, she sang us a couple of songs, one off of her little ep, and i agree with rachel: she’s going to be famous someday! she’s got a great voice, and a really great sound. not a great website, but you can’t have everything.
and pj, of course pj was fantastic. she just out and out rocked. she sounded great singing her new stuff, and even threw out a brand new song in there, and came back for three encores, which means she loves us twice as much right? since the first encore is a gimme…
oh, and i finally saw dopamine, which was the movie that hmc was supposed to be coordinator on but had to leave because of that car accident the first day of her job way back in the day. it was horrible. it’s the worst movie i’ve seen in a long time. i don’t know if that accident is a blessing or not. i’m going to say no, but it’s still horrible.
i’m flying to chicago today for the weekend, courtesy of the other rachel.
she’s flying me there to see pj harvey with her. because she loves pj and i love pj. and she was sad for me that i missed pj. and because pj’s playing in chicago this weekend.
and because she kicks ass. and i love her.
but why is it so damn cold over there? oh yeah, fall in the midwest. didn’t i claim to like it? again, i’ve grown soft living on the temperate coast. i can’t bear to be outside the range of 65-75 degrees!
but am i complaining? really? no.
pj!
quick debate aside, from the new york times:
When the networks (flouting the debate rules) cut to Mr. Bush while Senator John Kerry was speaking, the president had the hunched shoulders and the peevish, defensive look of an incumbent under heavy attack.
And it was body language as much as rhetoric and one-liners that distinguished the two candidates in last night’s debate. The networks were right to disregard the campaigns’ ban on cutaways and reaction shots. Instead, all the networks, including Fox News, lavished viewers with split screens and shots of the candidates from almost every angle, including shots from behind the president’s tensely knotted back.
Television homes in on feelings hidden beneath rehearsed words and reveals instinctive responses and glimmers of personality.
The cameras demonstrated that Mr. Bush cannot hear criticism without frowning, blinking and squirming (he even sighed once). They showed that Mr. Kerry can control his anger and stay cool but that he cannot suppress his inner overeager A student, flashing a bleach-white smile and nodding hungrily at each question.
…
The decision to have the two lecterns be of matching height (50 inches) turned out to work against Mr. Bush. The agreed-upon lectern cut the president mid-chest, and made him look smaller, as if he were in a bunker. He did not extend himself beyond its confines, but instead kept his arms in front of him, barely peeking above the lip of the lectern.
…
At the end of the debate, the candidates’ wives had their own moment of nonverbal oneupmanship. Both wore white silk suits, and both tried to be gracious. Laura Bush smiled and whispered something in Teresa Heinz Kerry’s ear; Mrs. Heinz Kerry turned their hug into a jaunty joint wave to the crowd. Mr. Kerry got into the shot with the two women. Mr. Bush went to his daughters in the corner and rushed offstage.
let’s get ready to rumble!
