Tag: reflections

Here’s a set of two signs in front of a vase that Damog and I found at the Museum of the Zona Arqueológica del Templo Mayor in Mexico city. Yes, that’s a sign in braille.

Keep thinking about it. It’s an intriguing juxtaposition on several levels.

Today I learned where Chihuahua was. I haven’t gone there yet but I hope to some day. I’m afraid it will be a repeat of my trip to Dalmatia; I didn’t see a single dalmatian in Dalmatia — at least not of the spotted canine variety.

I grew up in Seattle which is less than 2 hours from the Canadian border. I always thought the following idea would be a fun and enjoyable way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

A group of us could fill up a car trunk with hundreds of clear plastic bags full of white baking ingredients — flour, sugar, baking power, baking soda, etc — and then drive back and forth across the Canadian, US border. If stopped and searched, we would insist that we were planning on baking a whole lot of cakes.

In the absence of laws against harassing mounties and the US Customs officials, this would be a very good plan.

People think I’m joking when I say that if I ever have a child, I will name her (or him) Debian.

I’m not.

Like many others, I ordered a pile of free (as in both speech and beer) Ubuntu CDs through Ubuntu’s website. My CDs were shipped via a courier service called TNT Global Express.

I think that in todays environment of oversensitivity and confusion around explosives and air travel, an air-mail courier service like TNT could have picked a better name. I can imagine some humorous confusion that I would wager the folks at Homeland Security (whose sense of humor seems to have been surgically removed in the operation to excise their critical capacity) would not find too humorous at all.

When I was at University and several times in my career as a Free/Open Source software consultant, I’ve been involved in crafting "Long Term Technology Plans."

I am now convinced that a long term technology plan that does not include flying cars is no long term technology plan at all.

I think that if you want to secretly insult somebody, you should call them a star. People tend to only think of stars in the sense of being refulgent or luminary. I think that the term star could just as accurately be used to imply that you think that the person is a giant ball of gas or hot air. The person being insulted will never guess.

I’m a pretty transparent person in the "it’s easy to stalk me" sense of the term. My address and phone number is on my webpage and I’m happy to post just about anything that I don’t think would anger people on my blog or my website.

Once at college, I was at a party and I met and started chatting with an attractive girl for the first time but whom I was marginally acquainted with (we had a discussion-based class the year before). Things were going great and, once I had revealed my geeky-disposition, conversation stumbled onto computer mediated communication. I tried to support one of my positions with a story about when I was on BBSs in my youth. She stopped and said that she knew. Completely surprised, I asked her how she could possibly know personal events from when I was twelve and living a country away. She admitted, sheepishly, that she’d read it on my website.

True enough, I had included this particular anecdote in largely autobiographical The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: My Story of Unlearning which I wrote for the small Indian publication Vimukt Shiksha and had posted on my website. As you might imagine, it caught me a little off guard when I found out that this "near strange" had read my website and it threw the "chatting up" plan for a loop.

Now I expect some people to read my website; I wouldn’t bother putting things online otherwise. That said, I do not expect the girls I meet at parties to have read my website.

I’ve reflected a little bit on why I was shocked. I think I’m less worried about revealing embarrassing information or wrong information and more worried people will know all my good stories and examples. The worst part of this whole thing is that since then, this situation has been of my favorite stories and now it’s on my website.

I think being green — and I do not mean this in any of the metaphorical senses of the term but rather in the sense of having skin of a green hue — is a pretty undesirably thing overall.

That said, I’d be happy to be green if it meant I could photosynthesize.

Mika and I were comparing the names of fingers and toes in different languages we know. Mika was saying that in addition to being called kusuri yubi (薬指 or "medicine or drug finger") and benisashi yubi (紅差指 or "lipstick finger"), Japanese people also call the "ring finger" mumeishi (無名指 or "no-name finger"). I think "no-name" is a pretty great name for a finger.

If I am ever rich and if my alma mater convinces me to donate a whole bunch of money, I will do it with the stipulation that they name a hill (that’s a hill, not a hall) on the campus after me. I think it would be nice to have a Hill Hill.

Bill Gates and his family donates lots of money to universities around the country and there are many Gates Halls. If I were him, I would donate the same amount of money but ask that the universities name gates, rather than halls, after me.

Imagine a school with the Gates Gates, Hill Hill, and Hall Hall. This is the type of institution of higher learning that I would trust our next generation’s future to.

Sometimes people say they don’t believe in things to means that they don’t agree with or subscribe to a concept. Someone might say, "I don’t believe in tax cuts for the wealthy." I always think for half a second, "do you not believe that they are good or do not believe they exist." It’s entertaining to imagine not believing in common things that we take for granted.

If you think about it, such skepticism is is not always totally unjustified. I’ve heard of people that don’t believe in plate tectonics which, if you think about it, is not a totally insensible thing to not believe in (although I do believe in plate tectonics myself).

I think it would be a good experiment if everyone would, for one day, act as if they don’t believe in things that they have not personally seen or experienced convincing evidence of existence.

We should all spend one day in a world without big things, small things, or concepts; no germs, macroeconomics, political assassinations, and much more.

The next day we will return back to normal but I think we will all have a lot more perspective.

I have read that many snakes are immune to their own venom. This makes sense.

I think it’s strange that people can be tickled with their own hair.

Putting together a realistic undersea diorama must be difficult. The diorama-maker must work to create a dynamic environment implying movement and revealing a intriguing and ascetically appealing scene. As if this weren’t enough, they must also worry about balancing the fish model and getting the fish to hang at realistic angles.

This is all very difficult of course because they must also worry about carefully hiding or obscuring the supports that hold the fish in mid-air.

I think that underwater diorama makers must love the Tripod Fish (Bathypterois) pictured below.

Today I learned about black smokers. For those who (like me earlier today) do not know, black smokers are underwater mineral-rich hydrothermal vents and the large chimney like structures that form around them.

A black smoker (of the hydothermal variety) is in the first picture below. It’s not to be confused with the black smoker (of the golf legend variety) in the second picture below.

Figure 1: Black Smoker (Anonymous)

Figure 2: Black Smoker (Charlie Sifford)

In related news, I don’t care how many cigarette-smoking, dark-skinned, hydrothermal vent researches there are. There are not enough.