Month: September 2007

A recent posting in the blog Making Light points to a Flickr photoset of science tattoos.

Remember the Simpsons episode titled Homer Goes to College?

Benjamin (one of Homer’s nerd roomates): Come on, Mr. Simpson, you’ll never pass this course without learning the periodic table.

Homer: I’ll write it on my hand.

Benjamin: Hoh! Including all known lanthanides & actinides? Good luck!

Well, the guy in the photo below may not have written it on his hand, but he has managed to get the complete periodic table of the elements — and yes, complete with all known lanthanides and actinides (those are the two extra rows below the main table) — on his forearm, and permanently to boot!

Click the photo to see it on its original Flickr page.
Found via Making Light.

I’m more of a physics and math guy than a chemistry guy, so these tats appeal to me a little more:

Click the photo to see it on its original Flickr page.
Found via Making Light.

And finally, the time dilation equation:

Click the photo to see it on its original Flickr page.
Found via Making Light.

The gist of this formula says that time slows down as you go faster. The slowing down doesn’t become really noticeable until you hit about one-tenth the speed of light; a 1970s experiment with two jets, each with its atomic clock, has provided empirical evidence.

Many science people I know — myself included — like to take scientific laws and weave them into our own personal philosophies. The owner of the time dilation formula is no exception:

The time dilation formula is over my heart and represents my personal belief in life: the faster you go, the more you get to see and the more you get to live. Maximum intensity and maximum velocity at all times for maximum lifetime experience per life.

In the words of Captain Picard: “Maximum warp! Engage!”

This image goes out to all you high school nerds who are wondering if the hurting ever ends: yes, and sometimes quite decidedly so.

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Take my word for it: it gets better. Better yet, take successful nerd Paul Graham’s word for it. Here’s an excerpt from his 2003 essay on nerds and the high school pecking order, Why Nerds are Unpopular:

Nerds aren’t losers. They’re just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It’s hard to find successful adults now who don’t claim to have been nerds in high school.

It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It’s all-encompassing, like life, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you’re still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don’t have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Me, AKMA and Si at BloggerCon, October 2003, Harvard Law School.

I’d like to wish Reverend A.K.M. Adam — known on the ‘Net as “AKMA” — a happy 50th birthday!

I Owe AKMA Big-Time

I’d known AKMA for over a year when I met him in person at a cocktail party at the first BloggerCon conference back in October 2003. The cocktail party was restricted to only those people who had ponied up the US$500 for the paid portion of the conference; I was there to catch the free-of-charge sessions the following day. Since the cocktail party was filled with some serious bigwigs with whom I wanted to schmooze, I decided to use a tried-and-true trick for getting into places where I wasn’t allowed: wearing a dark suit, bringing the accordion and pretending to be the entertainment.

Armed with an accordion and a little white lie told to the guy minding the door at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I got into the cocktail party without any fuss. The first person I ran into was AKMA. We had a good conversation during which time he performed a great number of introductions.

At one point in the conversation, he saw Wendy working her way through the crowd.

“Wendy!” he called out. “Over here!”

This was not good. Wendy was the coordinator for the conference and was probably the one person in the entire room who would know that I wasn’t supposed to be there. She made her way over to us, and it was too late to weasel out.

“Wendy, I’d like you to meet Joey. Joey, this is Wendy.”

“The Redhead Wore Crimson, I said, reciting the name of her blog at the time. I like your blog; it’s a good read.”

Luckily for me, she was in a good mood and decided not to kick me out of the party. The next night, I invited her to join a group of us for dinner, and the rest is history.

Simply put, AKMA introduced me to my wife, and for that I will be forever grateful. Thanks, Padre!

It was only fitting that AKMA should take part in our wedding ceremony. He gave what I believe to be the best homily I’ve ever heard at a wedding. The transcript is here, and I plan on posting the video in the next couple of weeks.

Once again, happy birthday, AKMA!

Like me, my friend Nick was an “8-year-man” at De La Salle College Oaklands, a Catholic high school located just north of downtown Accordion City. We spent grades 6 through 13 there, during which time the school hosted its most famous student, Keanu Reeves, who spent a year there and was notable for:

• Having a oddball name
• Having an oddbal nickname: “The Wall”, for his skill as a defenceman on our hockey team. He still bears this nickname today, but now it’s for his acting ability.

Ever since Keanu’s rise to fame, editions of Acorn — our yearbook — containing the Master Thespian are in great demand. Copies of the yearbook from his brief time with us have since gone missing for the school library, and no, you can’t have mine.

“Del”, as the school was affectionately known, was an all-boys school when we were there. Students from grades 6 through 8 wore the middle-school green blazers while students in grade 9 and up wore blue blazers. Since I’ve graduated, Del has gone co-ed and everybody wears green blazers.

Nick recently posted a photo of an informal group called the De La Salle Country Club, of which I was a member. The Country Club had no real structured activities: we were just a bunch of friends who brought our own lawnchairs to school to hang out during our breaks when we weren’t annoying the staff at the nearby McDonald’s or the now defunct Cafe Marika, whose motto could’ve been “Serving alcohol to Toronto’s youth since they were 16”.

Here’s the photo, which was taken in the winter, probably late 1985 or early 1986. Pictured in the photo from left to right are: Steve, Greg (above Steve), Nick and Yours Truly:

This is what a marvelously misspent youth looks like. Steve, Greg, Nick and me at 18.