I’ve always liked the gravity–defying hairstyles sported by anime characters, so when I woke up Saturday morning and saw this, I had to take a picture:
The difference between playing to not lose and playing to win may seem subtle, but it’s everything. Hopefully Marshall isn’t too mad at me for playing to win. You know how it is once I get my Sun Tzu on.
(Yup, another unbloggable entry. If you really must know, I will tell it to you if you buy me drink, and yes, the accordion is involved.)
Damn, those girls at the health food store near Queen and Peter Streets are cute!
To my faithful readership: sorry the posts haven’t been as substantial and as full of Joey goodness as usual — things have been a little hectic for your ‘umble accordion player over the past couple of weeks, what with work, housemate hunting, getting my finances in order and of course, girl-chasing. The good news is that all this activity means that I have stories to tell, most of them tellable on this weblog. I’ll get to the telling in short order. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
When I stepped out to go to work this morning, there was a smoky haze everywhere. It turns out that a fire on the waterfront has been blazing out of control all morning, and the smoke has been pouring everywhere. The surprising thing is that the fire’s a good distance away — the fire’s east of the Don Valley, and over here in clubland, the smoke is everywhere (although it’s no thicker than light morning fog). The smell of hickory is everywhere.
Here’s a New York Times story on Tent City (free registration required or login using the name “metafilter”, password “metafilter”), a shantytown near the undeveloped dock area by Cherry Street. I’ve seen it, and it looks like it’s been getting larger over the past few months. Along with the increasing number of panhandlers on the streets — Queen Street is getting up to two or three per block — it’s a bad economic sign.
We’re still a long way from having Star Trek-style transporters, but an Australian research team has taken a small step towards that goal. In a recent experiment, the researchers took a laser beam, “destroyed” it (didn’t they just turn it off?), and built an exact replica of it one metre away in the span of 30 billionths of a second. In theory, they should be able to teleport the laser over a distance of kilometres and team leader Dr. Ping Koy Lam says that while they can only transport light right now, they hope to transport a single atom or even even a small number of atoms in three to five years.
Philosophical issues aside — this kind of teleportation destroys the original and creates an exact duplicate elsewhere, which leads to questions like “will that still be ‘me’ at the end of the transport?” — what worries me is the math skills of the team leader. Here’s a quote from the story in the Australian newspaper, The Age:
“At the moment we don’t know how to teleport a single atom and a typical human being has 10 to the 17th atoms, which is one followed by 27 zeros,” he said.
Uh, Doc, 10 to the 17th is written as one followed by 17 zeroes, not 27. The quote — which I’m hoping is the newspaper’s error’s and not the scientist’s — is off by ten orders of magnitude.
For my non-mathematically-inclined stoner friends who don’t know what “ten orders of magnitude” means, imagine putting a dime bag of weed on Dr. Lam’s transporter pad. You’d the “energize” button, and it would appear at the destination as a trillion tons of the stinky stuff, which is more than half the mass of the moon. Par-tay!
IBM did some research into teleportation almost ten years back. I nominate IBM research employee Wes Felter as a test subject. đ
Charles and Ray Eames weren’t only just designers of cool furniture, they were also pretty good filmmakers! Their best-known film is a nine-minute wonder called Powers of Ten, which starts with people at a picnic and zooms outward to the intergalactic scale and inward to the subatomic. It’s one of the few educational films worth watching again.
Here’s a page with an interactive “Powers of Ten” Java applet inspired by the Eames film.