scootergrrl

scooterbub

2010-03-24T00:11:00.002+11:00

Great love.

Our little Tiger keeps us rather busy these days.

My feeds will still be updated now and again.

Even I want to become an entrepreneur after this! :D

2009-07-30T22:29:00.000+10:00

12 Years

2009-07-26T13:28:00.000+10:00

Happy 12 years, baby.

Love you forever.

Australian Internet Censorship Fail

2009-07-09T13:00:00.005+10:00

Funny viral video Censordyne: good, clean internet censorship

Sign the petition against internet censorship in Oz.

More information on Censordyne.

From the folks at GetUp!

"Imagine a government proposing an internet censorship system that went further than any other democracy - one that made the internet up to 87% slower, more expensive, accidentally blocked up to one in 12 legitimate sites, and missed the vast majority of inappropriate content.

This is not China, Saudi Arabia or Iran - this is the vision of Senator Stephen Conroy for Australia. Testing has already begun. The community must now move to stop this plan. Click here to save the net:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet

The system that Senator Conroy wants is a mandatory filter of all internet traffic, with the government of the day able to add any unwanted site to a secret blacklist. Already, the wrangling has begun for the inclusion of material relating to anorexia, euthanasia and gambling. It isn't difficult to see the scheme is open to abuse.

Even when it comes to preventing child p-rnography, the filter will not prevent peer-to-peer sharing and is very simple to sidestep. The protection of our children is vitally important - that's why we can't afford to waste funds on this deeply flawed system. We should be concentrating on solutions that are more effective and won't undermine our digital economy or our democratic freedoms.

This must rank as one of the most ill-thought decisions of the Rudd Government's first year in power. We need to act now to tell big brother the mandatory internet filter is incompatible with the principles of a modern democracy and modern economy:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet

Our government should be doing all in its power to take Australia into the 21st century economy, and to protect our children. This proposed internet censorship does neither. Take action to save the net today.

Thanks for being a part of the solution,
The GetUp team

PS - The proposed scheme will pass all internet traffic through a government filter - it's like asking Australia Post to filter every letter sent in Australia. Click here to save the net."

Inspirational Women Scientists

2009-07-07T12:36:00.002+10:00

Rather sad that most of these names are not commonly known.

1. Marie Curie 1867-1934

Physicist who was the first European woman to be awarded a doctorate in science. Won a share of two Nobel prizes for her work on radioactivity (25.1% of the vote)

2. Rosalind Franklin 1920-1958

Chemist who did much of the groundwork for James Watson and Francis Crick's Nobel prize-winning discovery of the structure of DNA (14.2%)

3. Hypatia of Alexandria 370-415

Wrote treatises on geometry, algebra and astronomy in Roman Alexandria. A staunch critic of religion, she was murdered by a Christian mob (9.4%)

4. Jocelyn Bell Burnell 1943-

Astrophysicist who co-discovered pulsars as a research student. Her male colleagues won the Nobel prize for the discovery (4.7%)

5. Ada, Countess Lovelace 1815-1852

Made major theoretical contributions to Charles Babbage's early work on computing (4.5%)

6. Lise Meitner 1878-1968

Co-discoverer of nuclear fission, for which her colleague Otto Hahn won the Nobel prize (4.4%)

7. Dorothy Hodgkin 1910-1994

Chemist who perfected the technique of X-ray diffraction. Won the Nobel prize in 1964 (3.8%)

8. Sophie Germain 1776-1831

Mathematician who made great progress on Fermat's last theorem, then unsolved (3.7%)

9. Rachel Carson 1907-1964

Biologist and writer, best known for Silent Spring, the book that launched the modern environmental movement (3.3%)

10. Jane Goodall 1934-

Primatologist, passionate advocate of animal rights and global leader of efforts to protect wild apes (2.7%)

Source

Courtesy of @guykawasaki

Phenomenal photos of Earth from space

2009-05-20T16:02:00.008+10:00

"This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. "

"This is one of the most famous photographs ever taken. It was captured by NASA astronaut Bill Anders as Apollo 8 was orbiting the Moon. This was the first time that humans had ever gone into orbit around another object in the Solar System. Seeing the entire Earth as a tiny ball hanging in space was nothing short of life changing."

This is a photograph of Tokyo, Japan - the biggest city in the world - imaged by International Space Station astronaut Dan Tani on February 5, 2008. The brightest part of the city is the center, with ribbons of light stretching out of the city center following roads and public transit routes.

"South of Khartoum, Sudan, where the White and Blue Nile Rivers join, a dizzying arrangement of irrigated fields stretches out across the state of El Gezira. The several bare-looking patches are small villages. This image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite on December 25, 2006."

"...houses and streets in bustling Las Vegas, Nevada are seen in this image from the commercial IKONOS satellite taken in September of 2004."

View them all here.

Courtesy of @guykawasaki

Annamaya

2009-05-16T01:18:00.015+10:00

Delicious, clean, and distinctive flavours. Vegetarian dining, friendly service, good music (mostly), tranquil ambiance complete with old clocks with old-school chimes on the quarter hour, wifi and Non-Smoking! I have found my new haunt in Shanghai.

Kazu, a lovely Japanese lass, and Fela, a friendly Pommy lad, and chef Sayaka, opened Annamaya approximately one week ago.

I have, over two visits, enjoyed the quiche with salad, and the Japanese set with cold soba noodles (delish) and onagiri (rice ball jobbies - also delish). Interesting, vaguely unidentifiable, tasty soups were served in beautiful ceramic mugs and bowls . Yummy blends of fresh juices on offer include pear and green leaf, and carrot, apple and ginger. The Earl Grey tea cake is divine and reminiscent of the best cake I have savoured in life to date - the poppyseed cake at Blue Elephant, Prahran, Victoria, Oz circa 1994. I will soon sample the apple pie, and ginger scones (3 scones for RMB15), and maybe even the eyebrow-raising tofu cheesecake (hmmm...). Lunch set RMB50, dinner set RMB70. Cakes RMB30, tea RMB25, juices RMB35.

I am a big fan of the larger tables for spreading out laptops, books and what not (during quieter times).

A great place to park and read or scribble.

Thank you Kazu, Fela, and Sayaka for this wonderful oasis in Shanghai.

3 Taojiang Lu.
6433 4602
11:00am - late.
annamaya shanghai healthy vegetarian restaurant shanghai nonsmoking non-smoking restaurant shanghai

Amazing spacewalk photos

2009-05-15T23:53:00.002+10:00

"Bruce McCandless II took the first untethered space walk in February 1984. Here we see him from Challenger, floating above Earth."

More at Wired courtesy of @stephenfry

Random Tidbits

2009-05-14T13:13:00.004+10:00

Came across an interesting section in The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives and thought to share it:

"Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our novel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and send those letters that say thanks but no thanks? One book in the 1950s was rejected by publishers, who responded with such comments as "very dull," "a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances ad adolescent emotions," and "even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject [World War II] was timely, I don't see that there would have been a chance for it." That book, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, has 30 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history. Rejection letters were also sent to Sylvia Plath because "there certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice," to George Orwell for Animal Farm because "it is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.," and to Isaac Bashevis Singer because "it's Poland and the rich Jews again." Before he hit it big, Tony Hillerman's agent dumped him, advising that he should "get rid of all that Indian stuff."

Those were not isolated misjudgments. In fact, many books destined for great success had to survive not just rejection, but repeated rejection. For example, few books today are considered to have more obvious and nearly universal appeal than the works of John Grisham, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), and J.K. Rowling. Yet the manuscripts they wrote before they became famous - all eventually hugely successful - were all repeatedly rejected. John Grisham's manuscript for A Time to Kill was rejected by twenty-six publishers; his second manuscript, for The Firm, drew interest from publishers only after a bootleg copy circulating in Hollywood drew a $600,000 offer for the movie rights. Dr Seuss's first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. And J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by nine. Then there is the other side of the coin - the side anyone in the business knows all too well: the many authors who had great potential but never made it, John Grishams who quit after the first twenty rejections or J.K. Rowlings who gave up after the first five. After his many rejections, one such writer, John Kennedy Toole, lost hope of ever getting his novel published and committed suicide. His mother persevered, however, and eleven years later A Confederacy of Dunces was published; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has sold nearly 2 million copies."

Breathing in Shanghai

2009-05-08T00:39:00.004+10:00

Just changed the Blue Air purifier filters in the apartment. Above photo shows 3 filters: leftmost is the new filter, the other two are filters from the last year (they are replaced every 6 months).

Filter for the smaller machines (e.g. for bedrooms).

I never open the windows - but there is circulation since the seals on the doors and windows aren't the best. So, I imagine one would have to change the filter every 3 months or so if windows / balcony doors are regularly opened for extended periods of time.

Hmmm... maybe I should change the filters every 4-5 months rather than 6.
blue air shanghai blue air purifier shanghai china

Amazing TED Talk: Juan Enriquez: Beyond the crisis, mindboggling science and the arrival of Homo evolutis

2009-05-03T19:47:00.000+10:00

Courtesy of Fabrice Grinda.

Lego Mindstorms NerdJoy: 3D Scanner

2009-03-24T22:27:00.004+11:00

O my FSM!!! I am blinded by its oarsomeness!

More about this genius at engadget.

Courtesy of @guykawasaki

Gimme Geekjoy: Sound Advice Waveform Bracelets

2009-03-24T22:22:00.003+11:00

The Sound Advice Project turns any six second audio clip into a waveform bracelet.

Wonder what "E.T. phone home..." would look like.

Courtesy of UberReview

I'm going to Mars!

2009-03-23T19:42:00.004+11:00

In 2011, Scooterboy and I will piggyback on Mars Science Laboratory for a trip to Mars! Whooo hoooo! 8)

Hitch a ride here.

More geek awesomeness @MarsScienceLab

Samantha Zaza

2009-03-06T03:43:00.004+11:00

Amazing art by Samantha Zaza.

One of her beautiful pieces decorates the top of the blog. I will have to find a way to permanently attribute her work on that piece. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly geek enough to get a hyperlink onto the art.

In the meantime, you can find more from szaza at Skineart.

Devastation at home

2009-02-11T14:03:00.005+11:00

Terrible accounts from survivors and rescue workers. Unimaginable suffering.

I hope the survivors and loved ones of those who perished will recover in time.

Sources of photos: ABC, and TheAge

Difficult to imagine that entire towns no longer exist. The Boy and I went for a long drive in the country on our first date in 1997 and stopped for dinner at a good friend's house in Kinglake. That house is no longer standing, and neither is most of Kinglake. Our friend moved away a few years ago and is safe. Many others were not so lucky.

26 Random Things You Don't Really Need To Know About Me

2009-02-06T13:29:00.006+11:00

Banged this together for a viral thing going round in Facebook. Have laffed out loud at a few friends' lists. Gotta love a good chuckle now and again.

1. The second toe on both feet is fully 1 cm longer than the big toe. Yes, I am a monkey.

2. My feet are completely flat. ZERO arches. Yes, I am a monkey-duck.

3. I can't get enough of books and bookstores. I am a monkey-duck-bookworm.

4. I have acalculia and try to say it like it's some condition I can't help when really, I'm just seriously shit-house at mental math.

5. I was a fat bastard when I was a toddler. Fell sick when I was 4. Refused food, then water, and started wasting away. Mum freaked out when the docs couldn't do nothing so of course, she brought me to a witch-doctor (as you do), who told her that I had been possessed by a white tiger spirit residing in one of the trees on our plantation. They bathed me in some flowery stuff and over time, I recovered - right until I met The Boy who is lily-white and is a tiger (chinese horoscope). Hey Witch-doctor! *failure buzzer noise*.

6. I am eternally grateful for having found the love of my life and that he is an amazing guy, and my best friend.

7. I love that my mum told The Boy early in our dating days that she too had watched the violent kungfu movie last night, and then looked him in the eye and with a little smile said, "I like the violence." I love that The Boy promptly laffed his butt off.

8. I love that I have a mum who sleeps with a sword under her bed (oh so cleverly concealed as a walking stick), and the fact that she reckons she'll be right with that fine piece of metal in her hand against an assailant despite her 5 feet nothing status.

9. I love that my mum places hexes on people whom she thinks are dodgy. Atta girl! *thumbs up*

10. I am eternally grateful for having wonderful sisters.

11. I have a bag fetish. A couple of years ago, a friend made me count them all. The result did not at all reveal me to be a freak. (Phil: you're never getting an updated count)

12. When I was in kinder, I had an eyelash-batting crush on a little Indian boy by the name of Subrilu. I used to comb his hair with my Hello Kitty comb. WTF??

13. I love tea and wish T2 would freakin open a store in Shanghai, partly so their staff would stop asking me if I'm opening a cafe whenever I re-stock when back in Melbourne. Then I wouldn't have to explain that I'm stocking up since I'm living in Shanghai, following which there is the inevitable uncomfortable silence then - Aussies being the wonderful people that they are who just can't help themselves - the smart-arse comment, "Ya know, there's quite a bit of tea in Choina" *smirk*. Green teas, not black teas!!

14. I derive an inordinate amount of joy from peeling price tags off books. Borders' labels are the bomb!

15. I have only one regret in life so far - that I didn't have the guts to quit my Commerce degree after first year to hop over to the Arts faculty. Bloody Commerce - ceteris paribus: what the hell kind of bs IS that?!

16. Wish I were a super duper geek freak genius who worked for Pixar or Google.

17. Reckon I should have been a lab technician - minimal contact with people, highly detailed tasks. Yes, please!

18. Not working is every bit as bees-kneesy as I thought it would be and then some - enjoying it while I can.

19. Wish I could time travel. Would travel back and forth, but would especially love to see the future once humans are able to fold space and travel the universe. Star Trek is real dammit!

20. Wish I had a replicator and a holodeck. Nerd alert!

21. I am grateful that I am easily amused and often find the stupidest things funny.

22. I fidget heaps - a friend reckons that's how I stay slim. Hey, whatever works.

23. I have been around 48-50kgs for the last 15 years, but have, in the last year or so, noticed a slowly-but-surely widening of the butt, with an accompanying upward creep on the weighing scale. Very disturbing (especially when I think about some of the wide-loads in the extended family) *shudder* Must fidget more.

24. I am exhausted by watching and hearing other people's children run around, and am worried about having to contend with my own some day (is it a bad thing to lojack a kid?).

25. I reckon the obsession with the colour pink among young girls is creepy.

26. In kinder, a classmate tried to steal Shorthand, my teddy bear (it had little arms), out of my school bag. I clocked her one in the eye. It felt great.

Two Castles from England

2009-02-05T12:46:00.002+11:00

A couple of months ago, I shipped two suitcases from Melbourne to Shanghai via a freight company that I might name later (I will wait till I have my goods in my hands before doing so).

Yesterday, I received a call from the China staff of said company and the following conversation ensued:

FREIGHT HO: Halo! dis ssssrkjlrkjs slkejljer slkjskjrjs rrssshkkkttt (very fast speech in incomprehensibly accented 'English')
ME: I beg your pardon? Who are you again?
FREIGHT HO: ssdkljrslk srlkjss sssss (again, very fast speech).
ME: I'm sorry, could you speak a little slower? I'm having trouble understanding your accent.
FREIGHT HO: sssdkjhsdlf sssddlkjdsg sddffss (again, very fast speech).
ME: I'm sorry, did you say [Freight Company]? (I took a guess)
FREIGHT HO: Yes.
ME: Ah. Ok. Yes?
(The rest of the conversation on her side remained pretty much unintelligible, with much tooing-and froing between us as above, but I will skip most of the BS for expedience).
FREIGHT HO: We delivery two castles to you tomorrow.
ME: Castles?
FREIGHT HO: Yes.
ME: You mean, you are delivering two suitcases, yes?
FREIGHT HO: Yes. Two castles from England.
ME: No. Not England. We shippped two suitcases from Melbourne, Australia to Shanghai. Not England. Please confirm that you have the correct shipment.
FREIGHT HO: aaaaaaaaaah... I don know where shipped from.
ME: Ok. (I'm used to Chinese service and don't even bother reacting to this one)
ME: Please tell me my reference number (trying to force her to check that she had the correct shipment).
FREIGHT HO: aaaaaaaahhhh.... We delivery two castles tomorrow.
ME: What is my reference number?
FREIGHT HO: We delivery two castles tomorrow.
ME: Stop. Listen. What is my reference number?
FREIGHT HO: We delivery two castles tomorrow.
ME: Ok. My reference number is [Number]. Please check that you have the correct shipment.
FREIGHT HO: We delivery two castles tomorrow.
ME: Ok. Whatever.

Come 11:00am today (if they show up), I might be coming into a couple of castles from England *whooo hoooo!*

Gimme Rover!

2009-01-22T03:00:00.003+11:00

NASA's nifty lunar electric rover in the inaugural parade. Can't wait for touchdown *fingers crossed*

In First Family, a Nation’s Many Faces

2009-01-21T18:31:00.001+11:00

A look at how Obama's family is a new kind of family in the White House, representing not just Black America but many cultures.

read more | digg story

Super speedy climate change in our not too distant past

2009-01-16T17:06:00.004+11:00

I am currently reading Survival of the Sickest a riveting book on diseases and human evolution. I thought I would share a section that grabbed my attention:

"In the early 1970s, climatologists discovered that some of the best records of historic weather patterns were filed away in the glaciers and ice plateaus of northern Greenland. It was hard, treacherous work - if you're imagining the stereotypical lab rat in a white coat, think again. This was Extreme Sports: Ph.D. - multinational teams trekking across miles of ice, climbing thousands of feet, hauling tons of machines, and enduring altitude sickness and freakish cold, all so they could bore into a two-mile core of ice. But the prize was a pristine and unambiguous record of yearly precipitation and past temperature, unspoiled by milennia and willing to reveal its secrets with just a little chemical analysis. Once you paid it a visit, of course.

By the 1980s, these ice cores definitively confirmed the existence of the Younger Dryas - a severe drop in temperature that began around 13,000 years ago and lasted more than a thousand years. But that was just, well, the tip of the iceberg.

In 1989 the United States mounted an expedition to drill a core all the way to the bottom of the two-mile Greenland ice sheet - representing 110,000 years of climate history. Just twenty miles away, a European team was conducting a similar study. Four years later, both teams got to the bottom - and the meaning of rapid was about to change again.

The ice cores revealed that the Younger Dryas - the last ice age - ended in just three years. Ice age to no ice age - not in three thousand years, not in three hundred years, but in three plain years. What's more, the ice cores revealed that the onset of the Younger Dryas took just a decade. The proof was crystal clear this time - rapid climate change was very real. It was so rapid that scientists stopped using the word rapid to describe it, and started using words like abrupt and violent. Dr. Weart summed it up in his 2003 book:

Swings of temperature that scientists in the 1950s believed to take tens of thousand of years, in the 1970s to take thousands of years, and in the 1980s to take hundreds of years, were now found to take only decades.

In fact, there have been around a score of these abrupt climate changes over the last 110,000 years; the only truly stable period has been the last 11,000 years or so. Turns out, the present isn't the key to the past - it's the exception.

The most likely suspect for the onset of the Younger Dryas and the sudden return to ice age temperatures across Europe is the breakdown of the ocean "conveyor belt," or thermohaline circulation, in the Atlantic Ocean. When it's working normally - or at least the way we're used to it - the conveyor carries warm tropical water on the ocean surface to the north, where it cools, becomes denser, sinks, and is carried south through the ocean depths back to the Tropics. Under those circumstances, Britain is temperate even though it's on the same latitude as much of Siberia. But when the conveyor is disrupted - say, by a huge influx of warm fresh water melting off the Greenland ice sheet - it may have a significant impact on global climate and turn Europe into a very, very cold place."

Food for thought what with all the glacier melt underway *sheesh* Plenty of other fascinating information in this book. I highly recommend it!

Merry Xmas & Happy New Year!

2008-12-24T21:00:00.003+11:00

Goodbye 2008! Hello 2009 - may you be funner than 2008!

Merry Xmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah, Mazel Tov!

Beautiful sites

2008-12-24T20:47:00.013+11:00

100 Websites with Outstanding Artistic Design

Courtesy of either @xenijardin or @guykawasaki

Muppets YouTube Awesomeness

2008-12-18T20:38:00.001+11:00

O joy O joy!

Mucho Thanks BoingBoing!

Twelve Days of EFF

2008-12-18T20:10:00.002+11:00

More info here.

Courtesy of BoingBoing.

Home Sweet Home

2008-12-09T20:09:00.011+11:00

One of the many beautiful parks in the city.

Kicked back on the grass and watched the clouds float by.

Scooterboy reading in favourite park-in-the-middle-of-a-residential-street.

Stunning Fitzroy Gardens smack in the middle of the city.

It was wonderful to be back home again, albeit for a rather short time. The contrast with Shanghistan is truly astounding. Blue sky, clean air, clean water, friendly, logical and functional people, capable medical professionals, ambulances that can actually get to you and are equipped to save your life, civility, ethics, great food, KoKo Black, Brunetti's, Francois, Tiamo2, Oskar, St Ali, The Vic Market Deli, bratwurst with sauerkraut at the Vic Market, the Vic Market, Gluttony, gorgeous parks, grass that you can walk/sit/lie on, bright colours, great markets, beautiful crafts, great book shops. Ah well, will just hang onto the fact that I will get to go home again one day.

Meanwhile, I'll remind myself of the positives of Shanghistan: cheap taxis, availability of help (cleaners), cheap massages, Sichuan/Hunan/Yunnan cuisine, Awfully Chocolate cakes.

Singing, "On the road again..."

2008-11-21T03:16:00.003+11:00

Back in a few shakes.

Hittin the frog and toad *whoo hooo*

30 Mars Phoenix Discoveries NASA Will Never Show the World

2008-11-20T01:10:00.006+11:00

Brilliant :D

More at Gizmodo.

Did You Know 3.0 (2008)

2008-11-19T00:54:00.001+11:00

The 25% of India's population with the highest IQ's is greater than the total population of the United States

Translation: India has more honors kids than America has kids

More facts, click on video below.

Hmmm... need to set up Armageddon farm by 2013 8)

Amazing images of aurora over Saturn's hexagonal storms

2008-11-18T04:18:00.002+11:00

More here.

Great interview with @MarsPhoenix

2008-11-18T04:13:00.001+11:00

"They liked the first-person aspect of it, even though they knew that somebody at JPL was doing it -- and I would get those questions, people would ask, "are you official NASA or are you just a space buff doing this?" and I would write back and tell them that no, this is the official NASA Twitter feed.

People just found that to be such a novel way of communicating.

Universe: I call it the "WALL-E Effect..."

McGregor: A lot of people mention that. What's funny is that it does all tie together, because the Pixar animators who drew WALL-E actually came to JPL back in 2006 to get their ideas for how to draw WALL-E. In fact, tomorrow, there's a Disney junket for the roll-out of the WALL-E DVD, and they're bringing all the media to JPL to see all these robots that their Pixar team saw way back before they did WALL-E. So it does all tie together."

Full interview here.

Courtesy of @veronica.

Armin Van Buuren Shanghai Jiggle Event

2008-11-17T00:48:00.012+11:00

Last night, I ventured from The Sanctuary to partake in the 'Shanghai nightlife'. This is not something I do in Shanghistan since I do not enjoy passively sucking down the equivalent of 2 boxes of Marlboros, looking around a room and wondering who isn't a hooker (either by the hour or BIBHooks i.e. Buy-in-Bulk-Hookers a.k.a. mistresses), gazing at all manner of male and female skanks, or watching too many machismo wankers as they struggle through life with small-shlong syndrome.

But, Armin Van Buuren was gracing Shanghistan with his presence. It had to be done. I had to give Shangistan the benefit of doubt and hope it would be a decent event, or that Scooterboy and I would at least have a good prance no matter what else happened.

Alas, Shanghistan rarely fails to disappoint. The Boy and I waded into the crowd which was a mass of shoulder-to-shoulder sweaty slime pretty much as soon as we entered the premises. We proceeded to look for the dance floor, repeatedly bumping into long couches and tables among the crowd, even as we moved closer to what we assumed to be the dance floor. It gradually dawned upon us that we were having difficulty finding the point where the couches and tables ended and the dance floor began, because the dance floor was about half the size of my living room (which is by no means expansive).

I was aghast at the assholism and dumbfuckedness in the decision making process in selecting M2 for the event. I imagine the dealings went something to this effect:

Promoter: M2 would be the perfect venue for the gig.
AVB rep: erm... looks rather small and what's with all these couches and tables all over the place?
Promoter: oh no no, it's perfect coz M2 is giving me a huge cut to push their club (Alternatively, "I have a stake in the club" or "It's my cousin's/uncle's/brother's/sister's club and I'm a sycophantic asshole").
AVB rep: No go. Too small.
Promoter: Ok I give you a cut.
AVB rep: I see. It's perfect!

There was no room whatsoever to dance. All the crowd on the 'dance floor' could manage was a vague bend-knees-sporadically-and-jiggle-up-and-down-a-little movement. Crowds away from the dance floor could manage a slightly more vigorous jiggle. Scooterboy and I managed to find a small spot near an exit on the second level (also stuffed to the rafters with couches and tables) where we could manage an occasional prance, even if we had to constantly move around the crowds trying to get past us. We gave up pretty quickly.

It was such a damn shame because the music was sensational. I imagined how different things could have been.

It could have been a night of euphoric dancing but instead, it was a usual night of abysmal crowd watching in Shanghistan. But I guess that is part of the problem over here. So many in the crowd were there just to be seen rather than to actually dance to Van Buuren's music, hence the culture of couches and tables instead of dance floors, the fat old cigar-brandishing men with by-the-hour/BIBHooks hanging off their arms, and the inordinate number of chicks in stab-through-eyeballs-and-kill-you stilettos (what kind of ho shows up to a dance party in stilettos??! Oh hang on... I guess the kind of ho who's trying to land a john).

*sigh*

Cassini

2008-11-13T02:05:00.004+11:00

Excerpt from video:
"On the evening of June 30th, 2004, in a manoeuvre that was so flawless and so perfect it seemed dreamt, the most ambitious inter-planetary spacecraft ever built called Cassini glided into orbit around the planet Saturn and at that point, it became the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the sun...

the most remarkable highlight of Cassini's exploration of Titan so far was the deployment of the Huygens probe. On January 14, 2005, an aerodynamically shaped flying saucer drifted on a piece of fabric through the hazy atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon and landed firmly on its surface. The humans had arrived in the solar system 10 times farther from the sun than the Earth and 7 times farther than we had ever landed anything before.

...reminder of the good and the glorious that we can achieve if we set our minds to it...

The exploration of our solar system is one of the signature enterprises of our time, we should be reveling in it, it belongs to us."

Courtesy of RichardDawkins.net

Interview with the legendary Carolyn Porco on Wired.

Watch her on TED: Carolyn Porco flies us to Saturn.

NASA Goes Deep, by Carolyn Porco.

Sleep tight, MarsPhoenix

2008-11-13T01:56:00.002+11:00

Farewell transmission from Mars.

Other posts on Gizmodo.

@MarsPhoenix

skineart pick: lagolo

2008-11-13T01:51:00.002+11:00

Nerd goodness: Finding Fame With a Prescient Call for Obama

2008-11-13T01:44:00.002+11:00

"In March, he introduced FiveThirtyEight.com, and it quickly became a go-to site for readers whose interest in raw numbers had grown after the close (and miscalled) elections in 2000 and 2004. As his reputation grew online — there’s a Facebook group called “There’s a 97.3 Percent Chance That Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend” — the mainstream media he disparaged for sloppy reporting came calling.

...Between his live TV appearances on election night, Mr. Silver updated his model and determined around 8 p.m., after New Hampshire went to Senator Obama, that Senator McCain had no way of winning. By the end of the night, Mr. Silver had predicted the popular vote within one percentage point, predicted 49 of 50 states’ results correctly, and predicted all of the resolved Senate races correctly."

Full article here.

FiveThirtyEight.

Skineart pick: szaza

2008-11-10T03:37:00.001+11:00

Unknown Structures "Tugging" at Universe, Study Says

2008-11-10T03:34:00.002+11:00

"Something may be out there. Way out there. On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland."

More at National Geographic.

Skineart pick: szaza

2008-11-10T03:30:00.001+11:00

Some sanity returns to the U.S.

2008-11-10T03:26:00.002+11:00

Pity about Prop 8 but at least some sanity prevailed.

Ballot Initiatives: States decriminalize pot, nix abortion limits... voters also okay doctor-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research and more...

Skineart pick: szaza

2008-11-10T03:23:00.002+11:00

A Butler Well Served by This Election

2008-11-10T03:17:00.002+11:00

"For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land."

Nice story. Teary ending.

Full article here.

Courtesy of @niubi.

Skineart pick

2008-11-10T03:11:00.003+11:00

MarsPhoenix Twitter epitaph winner

2008-11-07T18:33:00.003+11:00

I came, I saw, I dug.

"Our top prize winner, Graham Vosloo of South Africa, is also going to get an official Polo shirt and we have to say that he is a deserving recipient.

"The old maxim, 'Quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur' (anything said in Latin sounds profound) certainly applies!" Vosloo wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. "I'm super chuffed about this because I've been following the Phoenix Twitter since the landing — I even got up at 3 a.m. my local time to experience it."

We're pretty sure that chuffed translates to "psyched" or "pumped" or the like, but if it's actually some sort of South African curse word, we apologize profusely in advance."

Heh heh :D

More details on the best entries here.

Follow @MarsPhoenix and check out her guest blog stint at Gizmodo.

Nice one on Barry's Leo McGarry

2008-11-07T18:23:00.003+11:00

"Barack Obama once joked at a charity dinner that when Rahm Emanuel severed his middle finger, it almost rendered him mute.

Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff

Change.gov

2008-11-07T18:11:00.004+11:00

"a website launched by the Obama team's Presidential Transition Project which documents the transition into power and solicits ideas from the public."

Nice!

Courtesy of BoingBoing.

The 44th

2008-11-07T18:05:00.003+11:00

embiggen

An unfortunate number among the superstitious in Cantonese culture (possibly also in mainland Chinese culture).

Secret Service, please keep him alive.

Hat tip to Houston.

The Onion 2001 - freakish prescience

2008-11-07T03:02:00.002+11:00

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over'

Whoa!

Courtesy of @RyanBlock

Thank you, America. We knew you could.

2008-11-07T02:25:00.003+11:00

"She was a stranger, and she kissed me. Just for being an American.

It happened on the bus on my way to work Wednesday morning, a few hours after compatriots clamoring for change swept Barack Obama to his historic victory. I was on the phone, and the 20-something Austrian woman seated in front of me overheard me speaking English.

Without a word, she turned, pecked me on the cheek and stepped off at the next stop.

Nothing was said, but the message was clear: Today, we are all Americans."

Complete article here.

Courtesy of Dan Washburn.

Great images of Obama

2008-11-06T20:07:00.003+11:00

More here.

Courtesy of @xenijardan

Hope Lives!

2008-11-05T21:10:00.001+11:00

Congratulations, U.S.A! Congratulations, world!

GO BARRY!

More picks at my feeds

2008-11-03T03:35:00.002+11:00

More picks here.

Top NASA Photos of All Time: Star Trek cast and the real Enterprise

2008-11-03T03:27:00.002+11:00

Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine posted their picks for the 50 most memorable images from NASA's half-century history.

Shuttle Enterprise with cast of Star Trek, 1976 NASA’s prototype space shuttle was to have been named Constitution, but fans of the Star Trek TV show mounted a write-in campaign that led to it being named Enterprise. Here the show’s cast (minus William Shatner) poses with the test craft.

Courtesy of BoingBoing.

See more beautiful and amazing photos at top NASA pics of all time.

Dean Kamen Q&A: American culture needs a geek overhaul

2008-11-03T03:22:00.002+11:00

"What do you think is the most important science and technology issue to be addressed by the next president? What's the biggest issue he should take on?

Is it energy? Genomics? Is it bird flu? Is it the polar caps—are they really melting? Is it terrorism? You pick the crisis du jour: The answer to all these issues is going to be an educated, competent global society. This country ought to lead the world, for lots of reasons. And we ought to help the rest of the world get educated, because if they are educated, their impact on the environment is actually way less. If they are educated, they'll have better ideas than killing each other or killing you and me.
The next president should recognize the power of technology. Technology is how we create wealth, how we cure diseases, how we'll build an environment that's sustainable and also gives people the capacity to pull more out of this world and still leave it better than when they found it. You know, people always talk about rights in this country—I wish we had a bill of responsibilities. So I think the president has to stop thinking of the crisis du jour and say, "In this race between education and catastrophe, we need education to win." The next president better make sure that all kids are part of the solution, not part of the problem. And with 50 percent of the kids in the 20 largest school districts in the country not graduating high school, they're part of the problem. This is unsustainable. It has to change.

Courtesy of BoingBoing.

More here: Robots Can Save America from Britney Spears.

More inventor goodness from Kamen on the way

2008-11-03T03:14:00.003+11:00

Dean Kamen is working on building a Stirling Engine - efficient electrical energy from heat.

"Now he and his engineers have built and tested a range of Stirling engines suitable for mass production that can be run on anything from jet fuel to cow dung. The one in the boot of the small blue car is designed to extend its range and constantly recharge its batteries to make a new kind of hybrid vehicle: one fit for the roads of the 21st century. A Stirling-electric hybrid, Kamen tells me, can travel farther and more efficiently than conventional electric cars; it generates enough power to run energy-hungry devices such as heaters and defrosters that are essential for drivers who, unlike those he calls the 'tofu heads' of California, must cope with a cold climate; and even using petrol, the engine runs far cleaner than petrol-electric hybrids such as Toyota's Prius.

However, Kamen confesses, his new creation isn't quite finished yet: 'The Stirling engine's not hooked up. Which really pisses me off.'

But it could work?

'It will work,' he says. 'Trust me.'

*fingers crossed*

Courtesy of BoingBoing.

More here.

Hate's last stand

2008-11-03T03:10:00.001+11:00

"Let's not get carried away.

Let's not go so far as to suggest we're about to enter into some sort of fluffy utopian tofu puppy happyland where nipples fly free and consciousness expands and the fetid rivers of racism and homophobia that course through the American heartland like acidic sewage somehow magically vanish, somehow become dramatically curtailed, should the twin forces of progress known as President Obama and a vanquished California Proposition 8 somehow come to pass."

Time Top 50 Inventions 2008

2008-11-03T02:58:00.004+11:00

1. The Retail DNA Test
2. The Tesla Roadster
3. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
4. Hulu.com
5. The Large Hadron Collider
6. The Global Seed Vault
7. The Chevy Volt
8. Bullets That Shoot Bullets
9. The Orbital Internet
10. The World's Fastest Computer
11. Green Crude
12. Housing Funds
13. The Memristor
14. The Bionic Hand
15. The Direct-to-Web Supervilian Musical
16. The Dynamic Tower
17. The Mobile, Dexterous, Social Robot
18. The New Mars Rover
19. Montreal's Public Bike System
20. The Everything Game
21. The Synthetic Organism
22. The Shadowless Skyscraper
23. The Branded Candidate
24. Bionic Contacts
25. Thin-Film Solar Panels
26. The Speedo LZR Racer
27. Bubble Photography
28. The Invisibility Cloak
29. The 46th Mersenne Prime
30. The Internet of Things
31. Einstein's Fridge
32. Facebook for Spies
33. Biochemical Energy Harvester
34. Made-in-Transit Packaging
35. Airborne Wind Power
36. The New Ping-Pong Serve
37. Smog-Eating Cement
38. The Baseball Instant Replay
39. Enhanced Fingerprints
40. The Seven New Deadly Sins
41. The Peraves MonoTracer
42. Disenvoweling
43. High-Tech Running Shoes
44. Sunscreen for Plants
45. The Short Refinance
46. Aptera Electric Car
47. Google's Floating Data Center
48. The Time Eater Clock
49. Sound-Enhanced Food
50. A Camera for the Blind

List courtesy of Gizmodo.

View details of the inventions at TIME.

World of Warcraft oldie but a goodie

2008-11-02T16:30:00.001+11:00

Still laffin 2 years later :D

Yes, I am easily amused.

Renewable energy for all global energy needs by 2090

2008-11-01T21:54:00.002+11:00

"A new report from the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) and Greenpeace International concludes that renewable energy could provide all global energy needs by 2090. “Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook” provides a blueprint how."

*fingers crossed*

Download the report here.

Courtesy of 21st Century Power.

Chuckler: Overheard in New York

2008-10-28T20:51:00.001+11:00

Drunk guy to cop with nightstick: Ya' know what, you all should get like lightsabers and shit.
Cop: That would be fun.
Drunk guy: Yeah, I'd never fuck with you guys again.

--Yankee Stadium

Plenty more chuckles here.

Courtesy of Nicki.

Quick pick Barc pics

2008-10-11T15:37:00.018+11:00

It is taking a rather long time to sort through all the Barcelona photos and to add the nerdy notes that I like to add. Picked out a few of the faves so far.

Back from the first world

2008-10-09T19:01:00.007+11:00

Back in Shanghistan now after an excellent stint in Barcelona. What a beautiful and wonderful city! Blue blue sky, clean air, friendly and civilised people, amazing food, clean streets and all kinds of first-world goodness.

One good thing about living in Shanghistan is that it makes you appreciate the little things. One of the more memorable moments in Barcelona occurred when I approached an escalator with a rather large bunch of people. To my amazement, the crowd shifted itself quietly and efficiently, without any shoving or jostling, into stationary people on the right and lo-n-behold an open lane on the left for people to walk up!!!! I mean WOW! This NEVER happens in Shanghistan without having to manhandle stationary people out of the way. Also, sheer delight at encountering clean public toilets! WOW! No stink? And no piss all over the floor and crap all over the seat? Am I in some parallel universe? Oh wait, no, I'm just not in Shanghistan.

There were many more 'I love the first world' moments but I won't carry on about them lest I get a knock on the door.

I'm currently sorting through around a bajillion photos. Once I manage to cull a few of those, I'll upload them. Meanwhile, here's some food porn to ogle: boquerones en vinagre - best food discovery in Barcelona.

Yellowstone National Park: The largest active volcano on earth

2008-09-18T19:56:00.002+10:00

Excerpted from a wonderful book filled with interesting facts, authored by the brilliant Bill Bryson. I had no idea until I read the book that Yellowstone is the largest active volcano in the world, and that it is due to pop (approx 30,000 years overdue). When it goes, it will take out pretty much all of us (in the initial blast and thereafter, the 'volcanic winter'). Hope it doesn't happen within my lifetime... sheesh!

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
Page 278...

In the 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National Park, Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became puzzled about something that, oddly, had not troubled anyone before: he couldn't find the park's volcano. It had been known for a long time that Yellowstone was volcanic in nature - that's what accounted for all its geysers and other steamy features - and the one thing about volcanoes is that they are generally pretty conspicuous. But Christiansen couldn't find the Yellowstone volcano anywhere. In particular, what he couldn't find was a structure known as a caldera.

Most of us, when we think of volcanoes, think of the classic cone shape of Fuji or a Kilimanjaro, which is created when erupting magma accumulates in a symmetrical mound. These can form remarkably quickly. In 1943 at Paricutin in Mexico a farmer was startled to see smoke rising from a patch on his land. In one week he was the bemused owner of a cone 152 metres high. Within two years it had topped out at almost 430 metres and was more than 800 metres across. Altogether there are some ten thousand of these intrusively visible volcanoes on Earth, all but a few hundred of them extinct. But there is a second, less celebrated type of volcano that doesn't involve mountain-building. These are volcanoes so explosive that they burst open in a single mighty rupture, leaving behind a vast subsided pit, the caldera (from a Latin word for cauldron). Yellowstone obviously was of this second type, but Christiansen couldn't find the caldera anywhere.

By coincidence, just at this time NASA decided to test some new high-altitude cameras by taking photographs of Yellowstone, copies of which a thoughtful official passed on to the park authorities on the assumption that they might make a nice display for one of the visitor centres. As soon as Christiansen saw the photos he realized why he had failed to spot the caldera: virtually the whole park - 9,000 square kilometres - was caldera. The explosion had left a crater nearly 65 kilometres across - much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at ground level. At some time in the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far beyond the scale of anything known to humans.

Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that begins at least 200 kilometres down in the Earth and rises to near the surface, forming what is known as a superplume. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about 72 kilometres across - roughly the same dimensions as the park - and about 13 kilometres thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of an English county and reaching 13 kilometres into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and its surrounding territory about half a kilometre higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.

According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London, 'you wouldn't be able to get within a thousand kilometres of it' while it was erupting. The consequences that followed would be even worse...

... Since its first known eruption 16.5 million years ago, it has blown up about a hundred times, but the most recent three eruptions are the ones that get written about. The last eruption was a thousand times as big as that of Mount St Helens [which 'exploded with the force of five hundred Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, shooting out a murderous hot cloud at up to 1,050 kilometres an hour']; the ones before that was 280 times as big, and the one before that was so big nobody knows exactly how big it was. It was at least 2,500 times as big as St Helens, but perhaps 8,000 times as monstrous.

We have absolutely nothing to compare it to. The biggest blast in recent times was that of Krakatau in Indonesia in August 1883, which made a bang that reverberated around the world for nine days, and made water slosh as far away as the English Channel. But if you imagine the volume of ejected material from Krakatau as being about the size of a golf ball, then that from the biggest of the Yellowstone blasts would be the size of a sphere you could just about hide behind. On this scale, the Mount St Helens eruption would be no more than a pea.

The Yellowstone eruption of two million years ago put out enough ash to bury New York State to a depth of 20 metres or California to a depth of 6 metres. This was the ash that made Mike Voorhies' fossil beds in eastern Nebraska. That blast occurred in what is now Idaho, but over millions of years, at a rate of about 2.5 centimetres a year, the Earth's crust has travelled over it, so that today it is directly under northwest Wyoming. (The hot spot itself stays in one place, like an acetylene torch aimed at a ceiling.) In its wake it leaves the sort of rich volcanic plains that are ideal for growing potatoes, as Idaho's farmers long ago discovered. In another two million years, geologists like to joke, Yellowstone will be producing French fries for McDonald's and the people of Billings, Montana, will be stepping around the geysers.

The ash fall form the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico) - nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world's cereals. And ash, it is worth remembering, is not like a big snowfall that will melt in the spring. If you wanted to grow crops again, you would have to find some place to put all the ash. It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tonnes of debris from the 6.5 hectares of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas.

And that's not even to consider the climatic consequences. The last supervolcano eruption on Earth was at Toba, in northern Sumatra, 74,000 years ago. No-one knows quite how bit it was, but it was a whopper. Greenland ice cores show that the Toba blast was followed by six years of 'volcanic winter' and goodness knows how many poor growing seasons after that. The event, it is thought, may have carried humans right to the brink of extinction, reducing the global population to no more than a few thousand individuals. That would mean that all modern humans arose from a very small population base, which would explain our lack of genetic diversity. At all events, there is some evidence to suggest that for the next twenty thousand years the total number of people on Earth was never more than a few thousand at any time. That is, needless to say, a long time to spend recovering from a single blast.

All this was hypothetically interesting until 1973, when an odd occurrence made it suddenly momentous: water in Yellowstone Lake, in the heart of the park, began to run over the banks at the lake's southern end, flooding a meadow, while at the opposite end of the lake the water mysteriously flowed away. Geologists did a hasty survey and discovered that a large area of the park had developed an ominous bulge. This was lifting up one end of the lake and causing the water to run out at the other, as would happen if you lifted one side of a child's paddling pool. By 1984, the whole central region of the park - over 100 square kilometres - was more than a metre higher than it had been in 1924, when the park was last formally surveyed. Then, in 1985, the central part of the park subsided by 20 centimetres (about 9 inches). It now seems to be swelling again. The geologists realized that only one thing could cause this - a restless magma chamber. Yellowstone wasn't the site of an ancient supervolcano; it was the site of an active one. It was also at about this time that they were able to work out that the cycle of Yellowstone's eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due.

... 'And how much warning would you get if Yellowstone was going to go?'
He shrugged. 'Nobody was around the last time it blew, so nobody knows what the warning signs are. Probably you would have swarms of earthquakes and some surface uplift and possibly some changes in the pattern of behaviour of the geysers and steam vents, but nobody really knows.'
'So it could just blow without warning?'
He nodded thoughtfully. The trouble, he explained, is that nearly all the things that would constitute warning signs already exist in some measure at Yellowstone. 'Earthquakes are generally a precursor of volcanic eruptions, but the park already has lots of earthquakes - twelve hundred and sixty of them last year. Most of them are too small to be felt, but they are earthquakes nonetheless.'

A change in the pattern of geyser eruptions might also be taken as a clue, he said, but these too vary unpredictably. Once the most famous geyser in the park was Excelsior Geyser. It used to erupt regularly and spectacularly to heights of 100 metres, but in 1888 it just stopped. Then in 1985 it erupted again, though only to a height of 25 metres. Steamboat Geyser is the biggest geyser in the world when it blows, shooting water 120 metres into the air, but the intervals between its eruptions have ranged from as little as four days to almost fifty years. 'If it blew today and again next week, that wouldn't tell us anything at all about what it might do the following week or the week after or twenty years from now,' Doss says. ' The whole park is so volatile that it's essentially impossible to draw conclusions from almost anything that happens.'

Skine of the Day

2008-09-12T11:16:00.002+10:00

Matboy.

More at SkineArt.

CERN LHC Fires up. Earth still humming along nicely (so far so good)

2008-09-11T19:38:00.003+10:00

What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.

"... Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time."

Cool.

More here.

Nerd Fun: Chrome Comic Book

2008-09-02T12:05:00.002+10:00

Check out Google's comic book for Chrome, the new browser.

Screenshots of Chrome available here.

Skine.art

2008-09-01T01:50:00.003+10:00

tobiee

One of my current faves from Skine.art

Happy 30th Birthday Space Invaders!

2008-08-21T16:53:00.000+10:00

Space Invaders made by Neave Games

Bits and Bobs

2008-08-18T01:35:00.004+10:00

Excerpt from The Golden Ratio, by Mario Livio (2002)

P87: ... with the overall withering of intellectual curiosity in the West, interest in the Golden Ratio entered a long period of hibernation. The great Alexandrian library was destroyed by a series of attacks, first by the Romans and then by Christians and Muslims. Even Plato's Academy came to an end in A.D. 529, when the Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered the closing of all the Greek schools. During the depressing Dark Ages that followed, the French historian and bishop Gregory of Tours (538-594) lamented that "the study of letters is dead in our midst." In fact, the whole enterprise of science was essentially transferred in its entirety to India and the Arab world. A significant event of this period was the introduction of the so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals and of decimal notation...

... With the ascendancy of Islam, the Muslim world became an important center for mathematical study. Had it not been for the intellectual surge in Islam during the eighth century, most of the ancient mathematics would have been lost. In particular, Caliph-al-Mamun (786-833) established in Baghdad the Beit al-hikma (House of wisdom), which operated in a similar fashion to the famous Alexandrian university or "Museum." Indeed, the Abbasid empire subsumed any Alexandrian learning that had survived. According to tradition, after having a dream in which Aristotle appeared, the caliph decided to have all the ancient Greek works translated.

Many of the important Islamic contributions were algebraic in nature and touched on the Golden Ration only very peripherally. Nevertheless, at least three mathematicians should be mentioned: Al-Khwarizmi and Abu Kamil Shuja in the ninth century and Abu'l-Wafa in the tenth century.

Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi composed, in Baghada (at about 825), what is considered to be the most influential algebraic work of the period Kitah al-jabr wa al-muqabalah (The science of restoration and reduction). From this title ("al-jabr") comes the word "algebra" that we use today, since this was the first textbook used in Europe on that subject matter. Furthermore, the word "algorithm," used for any special method for solving a mathematical problem using a collection of exact procedural steps, comes from a distortion of al-Khwarizmi's name..."

2008 Olympic Cauldron Lighting

2008-08-14T17:01:00.002+10:00

I haven't really gotten into the Olympic spirit this time around but the lighting of the Olympic cauldron in Beijing was pretty darn cool. Nothing beats Barcelona's bow and arrow antics but the Beijing air-running and the zippy flame on lighting made even me smile.

Glad to have found the vids online. Larve YouTube 8)

The OMFG PLEASE LIGHT moment in Barcelona:

Beluga!

2008-08-12T20:59:00.003+10:00

Photo courtesy of National Geographic.

These guys are just too cute 8) (Bubble blowing action approx 1 min into the vid)

If the vid doesn't work in here, try here.

Gimme Gimme Eve!

2008-07-29T11:52:00.002+10:00

This is so huge and wonderful for humans. Space... the final frontier 8)

Hope the price drops to something vaguely affordable within my lifetime.

All about Eve

Virgin Galactic

More pics here courtesy of Xeni Jardan, BoingBoing.

11 Years

2008-07-27T08:52:00.000+10:00

Happy anniversary, baby. Love you forever.

Farewell, Randy.

2008-07-27T08:48:00.002+10:00

"If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself," Pausch said. "The dreams will come to you."

Rest in peace.

Carnegie Mellon

Randy Pausch

Where the Hell is Matt (2008)

2008-07-01T10:59:00.002+10:00

Larve the jig at the DMZ, Vomit Comet and the bouncin Papua New Guineans.

Heli-Q fun

2008-06-14T19:51:00.005+10:00

Christmas 2005, picture Scooterboy and I on a big oval and a remote controlled plane, Scooterboy's present from me. Virgin takeoff... BBBBZZZZZZZZ.... 9 seconds of joy and CRASH, one busted-ass wing and no more plane joy.

Birthday 2008, Scooterboy and his new Heli-Q. Virgin takeoff... BBBBZZZZZZ... some seconds later, CRASH. Happy happy chopper joy, the Heli-Q bounced and is good to go again.

So, yea. Neither of us can quite get the jigger to do what it does in the promotional video below, but I'm confident after some nerdy-hours-of-fun, we'll be landing the thing on each other's heads in no time.

U.S. Romp Pics

2008-06-12T14:06:00.005+10:00

I had a sensational time during my virgin foray into the U.S! Pity it was such a short trip. Oh well, just means that I will have to go back again to do justice to it 8) Larved NY, SF, Napa, Palo Alto, and Woodside, and all the wonderful people we came across. You guys rawk!

J.K. Rowling on the power of failure

2008-06-12T11:50:00.001+10:00

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

" The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure....

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,...Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way....Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned...."

Courtesy of BoingBoing

Video and full text here.

There's no place like home

2008-06-06T11:02:00.003+10:00

Gotta love good ol' Melbourne 8)

"Melbourne has retained its position as the best city in the world to call home...

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey ranked Melbourne, Vancouver and Vienna as the best cities for expatriates to live, with Perth fourth and Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney equal sixth."

Article here

2000 Miles

2008-05-17T18:24:00.003+10:00

Just discovered this. What a great tune. Would have so been our song last year, while The Boy and I were doing our long-distance stint (5000 miles). Thanks, Scooterboy :*

MSF Plug

2008-05-15T10:43:00.006+10:00

NYTimes

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a.k.a. Doctors Without Borders, on the ground in Burma and China (amongst numerous other countries/projects).

They had an existing presence in Burma and thus have been on the ground in Burma since day one of the cyclone tragedy. The Junta denied access to aid organisations, and I believe, are continuing to deny access.

MSF have 12 mobile medical teams in play, and are also distributing food. 90 staff on the ground, half medical.

Also deploying teams for the China earthquake disaster.

Can donate here.

More about MSF and their excellent work here.

While I'm on the topic of good folk doing great work, see also the Fred Hollows Foundation: $25 restores sight in a person, which often results in relief for an entire family (e.g. children who are taken out of school to care for the disabled family member, and the rest of the family). Fred Hollows was a great man. His foundation, founded by his wife, does brilliant work.

Hiatus and The Last Lecture

2008-05-14T19:00:00.006+10:00

Busy busy busy! Unlikely to post regularly here for the next month or so, what with imminent travel and other bits and bobs happening.

Will be back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, The Last Lecture, is now in my mitts and is a wonderful read so far. Thanks, Scooterboy! :*

Get your copy from Amazon.

PIXAR LOVE!

2008-05-01T13:52:00.000+10:00

June 27! June 27! *rubbing hands together gleefully*

The Dirty Truth About Plastic

2008-04-27T17:57:00.003+10:00

Whoa. This is waaay disturbing - particularly since in Shanghai, The Boy and I are 100% reliant on drinking water delivered by way of large plastic bottles (no way to know how safe they are).

Hmmm... so when is Kamen's miracle water distiller available for purchase?

Extracts from the article at Discover:

"The most pressing question about plastic, though, may be whether daily exposure alters the health and fertility of our children and perhaps even our children’s children. It turns out that the hormonelike chemicals in plastic may remodel our cells and tissue during key stages of development, both in the womb and in early childhood. When pregnant mice are exposed to chemicals in plastic, the mammary and prostate tissue of their developing embryos proliferates abnormally, and sensitivity to hormones is forever turned up. Perhaps most disturbing is the significant increase in chromosomal abnormalities in the eggs forming in those embryos. Those are the eggs that will make the next generation. Thus, if the worst-case scenario proves true, early exposure to plastic can reshape not just our children but their children, too.

...Two in particular stand out: bisphenol A (or BPA, used in polycarbonates and resins) and phthalates (used to make plastic soft and pliable). Both upset the way certain hormones function in the body, earning them the designation endocrine disrupters. They are both now the subject of fierce scientific and public scrutiny.

... If there is one point on which many scientists agree, it is the risk to the developing fetus and the young child. “At least a dozen studies have shown the effects of phthalates on human reproduction,” says University of Rochester epidemiologist and biostatistician Shanna Swan, the lead author of a much-cited study that showed higher exposure to some phthalates in mothers correlates with reduced “anogenital distance” in newborn boys. Biologists recognize a reduction in the length between the anus and the sex organ as an external marker of feminization, easily measured because it is typically twice as long in males as in females.

... Last November a panel sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) determined that there was at least “some concern” about BPA’s effect on the fetal and infant brain. Around the same time, the Centers for Disease Control reported that researchers there had found BPA—the United States produces 6 billion pounds of it yearly—in 93 percent of urine samples from 2,500 Americans aged 6 to 85. Children under age 12 had the highest concentrations.

... In other research, by reproductive biologist Patricia Hunt of Washington State University, female mice exposed to low amounts of BPA in the womb—amounts deemed “environmentally relevant”—had high levels of genetic errors in the eggs they produced. Worse still, the genetic errors in those eggs led to chromosome abnormalities in 40 percent of the next generation’s eggs. That is 20 times the incidence of such abnormalities in unexposed mice. How might this relate to human risk? According to commentators reviewing Hunt’s work in PLoS Genetics, the answers will be hard to tease out: Nearly one in five human pregnancies ends in miscarriage, half of which are due to chromosomal abnormalities. Abnormalities in a woman’s eggs increase as she ages, and more women are having children at a later age. “A proper study of this problem,” they wrote, “would require assessing the woman’s level of chemical exposure now and maintaining those data for two to three decades,” tracking the abnormalities in her children and grandchildren.

... Phthalate studies show similarly dramatic effects. When pregnant rats are exposed to high doses of phthalates, their male offspring are born with deformed genitalia. In 2005 Shanna Swan published the first study that looked for evidence of an obvious effect among boys. In 134 boys aged 2 months to 30 months, she found that sons whose mothers had higher levels of certain phthalates in their urine had a shorter distance between the anus and the penis. These boys were also likelier to have smaller penises and incompletely descended testicles. About one-quarter of American women have the higher phthalate levels she found in her study. This was particularly evident among women working in poorly ventilated nail salons, where one especially harmful phthalate, DBP, is released.

... Phthalate exposure does not come just from moms. A new study gives evidence that infants and toddlers exposed to lotions, shampoos, and powders with phthalates may have up to four times as much of it in their urine as those whose parents do not use the products. The study, just published in Pediatrics by Sheela Sathyanarayana of the University of Washington, looked at 163 children between the ages of 2 months and 28 months between the years 2000 and 2005. The results were alarming, not least because manufacturers are not required to list phthalates as ingredients on labels.

... regulation of synthetic estrogens as a class seems far off. BPA alone is “worth at least a million dollars every hour,” Welshons says. “And that figure is conservative. I’m surprised the chemical industry hasn’t tried to blow up our labs.”

In 1989 little was known about synthetic chemicals in everyday plastics and how they mimicked estrogens. Ana Soto, professor of cellular biology at Tufts University School of Medicine, and her colleagues were studying the effects of estrogen on a breast cancer cell line. “Suddenly all the cancer cells were proliferating maximally, whether they were being grown in a medium with estrogen or not,” Soto recalls. “We thought that somebody must have opened a bottle of the female hormone estradiol in the wrong place. We scrubbed the whole room, we bought new batches of everything, and the cells kept proliferating. So we began one by one to replace and substitute our equipment, and we finally found the contamination in tubes storing a component of the medium. The tube manufacturer had changed its formula, with the best intention of rendering the tubes more impact resistant. They said the new chemical was a trade secret. So we analyzed it ourselves, and it turned out to be nonylphenol. We injected the chemical into rats and demonstrated that it makes the epithelial lining of the uterus proliferate—a sign of its being an estrogen.” Nonylphenol is also a component in some detergents and other products, and its presence in British streams has been linked to the feminization of fish.

In 1998 another synthetic estrogen leached from animal cages and bottles in a different lab—this was the now-infamous BPA. Patricia Hunt (then working at Case Western Reserve University) was studying the endocrine environment of the aging ovary in mice. Suddenly, as in Soto’s lab, “our control data went nuts,” Hunt says. “We saw chromosomal abnormalities that would lead to pregnancy loss and birth defects. It turned out that all of our cages and water bottles were contaminated by the BPA in the polycarbonate plastic, which was being sterilized at high temperatures. We set about proving this contamination was coming from the water bottles and cages.” They published that work in 2003. In 2007 Hunt and her colleagues published a paper in PLoS Genetics demonstrating that BPA exposure in utero disrupts the earliest stages of egg development. The fetuses of pregnant mice exposed to low doses of BPA, Hunt says, had “gross aberrations. We were stunned to see the effects of this estrogenic substance.”

... “We have no choice,” Soto says. “If reproduction is being affected, the survival of the species is compromised. Sooner or later we have to regulate it. And what constitutes proof? In the 1950s a woman’s lifetime risk of breast cancer was 1 in 22; today it’s 1 in 7. A threefold increase cannot be genetic, it is most likely environmental, and many of us believe it is due to endocrine disrupters. To know whether fetal exposure to BPA is producing breast cancer in humans, you have to collect blood from the mother and the newborn, bank it, and follow that cohort for many, many decades. One generation of researchers can’t do it. This is painful, and the public should know about it.”

Full article here.

Chuckler: Graphic graphic

2008-04-27T17:53:00.002+10:00

The new logo for the UK Office of Government Commerce. Tilt your head to the left and look at it again. From The Register:

Well, we contacted the OGC for comment, and a spokesman gamely explained: "The OGC is currently overhauling the design of its corporate materials following a new strategy and forward direction. As part of this, the OGC has been developing a new visual identity, one aspect of which is a new logo.

"The proposed version, which you have sent over, has been shared with staff, and is now going through final technical stages. It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters 'OGC' - and is not inappropriate to an organisation that's looking to have a firm grip on government spend!"

Courtesy of BoingBoing

An oldie but a goodie

2008-04-27T17:42:00.002+10:00

Just read an introduction written by Arthur C. Clarke to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and thought I would share this nifty tidbit.

"So in writing our story line, at the early dawn of the space age, Stanley [Kubrik] and I had a credibility problem; we wanted to create something realistic and plausible that would not be made obsolete by the events of the next few years. And although our original working title was 'How the Solar System Was Won', Stanley was aiming at something more than a straightforward tale of exploration. As he was fond of telling me, "What I want is a theme of mythic grandeur."

Well, as the real year 2001 approaches, the movie has become part of popular culture: I doubt if even in his wildest dreams Stanley imagined that one day a hundred million Americans would know exactly who (what?) was speaking when a Super Bowl commercial announced in a silken yet sinister voice "It was a bug, Dave."

Moleskin Love

2008-04-22T14:32:00.001+10:00

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

THE LITTLE LAND
Little thoughtful creatures sit,
On the grassy coasts of it.

By Kim Coles

@Skineart

Chuckler: YoungMe / NowMe

2008-04-22T13:22:00.010+10:00

A chuckleworthy collection of 'then' and 'now' shots.

Check them out here. Courtesy of BoingBoing

Hundred-million year old feather

2008-04-22T13:13:00.003+10:00

"Seven dino-era feathers found perfectly preserved in amber in western France highlight a crucial stage in feather evolution, scientists report."

"The hundred-million-year-old plumage has features of both feather-like fibers found with some two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods and of modern bird feathers, the researchers said.

This means the fossils could fill a key gap in the puzzle of how dinosaurs gave rise to birds,.."

Article at National Geographic.

Oldest living tree found in Sweden: 9550 years

2008-04-22T12:57:00.004+10:00

"The trunk of the above tree is less than 600 years old—but its roots date back to 9,550 years ago, making it the world's oldest known living tree, scientists say."

"The study team also identified other ancient spruces in Sweden that were between 5,000 and 6,000 years old."

Article at National Geographic.

More Moleskin love

2008-04-21T18:37:00.001+10:00

by Taylor-White

courtesy of Skineart.

Ning's Infinite Ambition

2008-04-21T14:28:00.002+10:00

Interesting article. Thanks PL!

"Here's something you probably don't know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what's called a "viral expansion loop," a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it -- you won't find much). It's a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It's not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you'd have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million.

Viral loops have emerged as perhaps the most significant business accelerant to hit Silicon Valley since the search engine. They power many of the icons of Web 2.0, including Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr..."

Full article at Fast Company.

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand

2008-04-21T14:13:00.002+10:00

How sad that this is no surprise. As disappointing as the findings of this report are, it is still heartening to see that at least in the U.S., unlike other countries that spring to mind, corruption still has the chance of being revealed/discussed.

"Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks."

Full NYT article here.

Courtesy of niubi on Twitter.

Moleskin art

2008-04-17T23:59:00.006+10:00

A wonderful, eclectic collection of gems from various artists' Moleskin notebooks at skineart

Courtesy of BoingBoing

New Portishead album available for streaming next week!

2008-04-17T11:27:00.003+10:00

The legends are back!!

The album 'Third', will be available for streaming from April 21 from last.fm

More info here.

Portishead official site here.

Chuckler blog post:

"mixing

2007-10-02 17:14:00

hello we have mixed all the tracks and the whole album is shit, so were going to start all over again. ok only kidding...sorry ! its sound pretty good but we have to go back to a few things in the next few weeks though. it sound pretty different from what we have done before i dont think the fondue society will be happy oh well , like the bee joke ends....... fuk em bye geoff"

Super swank geek genius with $40 Wii remote!

2008-04-14T14:40:00.002+10:00

If you have trouble viewing the video here, click through to TED.

BRB - Feeds for now

2008-04-10T12:59:00.006+10:00

It is day 4 since we discovered we have a stalker on our hands. Yes, I am angry about it at the moment. But, I will be over it in a few days. So, instead of inflicting angry posts on my readers (however few or many that may be), I'm going to hold off until the fumes abate (unless I come across something really cool in the news that just has to be shared).

Meanwhile, my feeds (located in the right column) will continue to be updated. Even the Skank does not get in the way of my news junkie habits 8)

Ditty for CC the Skank

2008-04-10T12:29:00.066+10:00

"Buongiorno! I'm hot and single and feeling terribly glam,
all my guy buddies want to nail me,
I think people love me
coz I'm so spunky and sexy,
But I have no idea
that people just think
I'm a lonely old desperate skank." (Skank, FYI, 'desperate' was the word most consistently used by various parties to describe you).

Inspired by the Skank's own words (extracted from screenshots - I couldn't make up this drivel if I tried):

Favourite Movies:
(Top of the List) When Harry Met Sally
Skank's comment: I am still not cynical enough to think I have real guy friends who are my buddies w/o agenda.

Tequila Sunrise
Comment: restaurant/ bar/ beach/ 2boys4eachGal.. my favourite things in the world

Favourite quote: "girls like me don't stay in the open market for very long"

Skank's thread in the pathetically sad lonely loser support group - My Friends Are Getting Married. I'm Just Getting Drunk: "Let's face it, all my married friends are secretly envious"

"Seriously! Getting married? been there, done it! had a fab party! no regrets! Now that the marriage thing is out of the way [divorced, and thereafter dumped], there's no more pressure!

Meanwhile I'm having a fab time as serial monogamist [neglected to mention 'and shameless family-wrecker-want-to-be', and see also above 'dumped'] - thankful that I can get intoxicated on a whim!

don't get me wrong, I applaud all my friends who make that brave decision [it's not a 'brave decision' for everyone darl. Some couples actually love each other] In fact, I will not rule out doing it again myself [whoa nelly... good luck with that] - but while I'm hot & single, I'm feeling terribly glam!

oh yeah... what am I doing back here? my best friends are having a baby.. inevitably they'll be engrossed with the new baby for a few years before they find me facinating [sic] again.. so I figured it's time to find replacement-friends! [good luck with that one too]

My favourite sms from the Skank to The Boy (Skank was spending Christmas alone in a foreign land, and knew The Boy was home with his wife for Christmas)
"Are you missing me? Just getting drunk for the season and wish you were around."

Quintessential Predatory Shanghai Skank
Amongst plenty of other antics (including harassing me), and shortly before the abovementioned "I miss you. You miss me?" sms, whining and crying at an uninterested married/unavailable man about how he won't spend time with her anymore after his wife gets back into town.

Skank, you're all class. Some kinder sorts seem to initially feel sorry for you and your pathetic machinations, before quickly concluding that you are just delusional navel lint (which, I was quick to point out, is an insult to navel lint, since navel lint do not reach out from its pathetic existence to annoy anyone within striking distance who is willing to pay it attention).

Skank, seek help. Probably should start with Alcoholics Anonymous, then Narcissists Not-So-Anonymous (this is pretty evident every time you open your trap).

(NOTE: HPD individuals are prone to alcoholism and drug addiction and are quite adept at denying the related behaviors. They seek easy escape from pain, deny negative consequences, and fail to observe or accept responsibility for the impact of their behavior on others...

... individuals with HPD may become involved in drug or alcohol abuse because the substances can free them to act out in ways that are congenial to their inclination to be stimulus-seeking. Through drugs and alcohol, these individuals are able to transform themselves; they gain feelings of well-being, bolster a flagging sense of self-worth, and perhaps even come to feel omnipotent. Drugs and alcohol can disinhibit controlled HPD impulses so that there need be no assumption of personal responsibility or guilt for behavior.")

It continues to astound me that someone like Randy Pausch is dying, and the Skank continues to suck up Earth's resources. Skank, watch this and sit down (without a bottle) to re-think your life.

Also, those images of little girls that you chose as your Facebook profile photo were remarkably paedophilic. I especially liked the pouting toddler girl with the cigarette in her mouth. Nice one. Note: The Lolita act does not work when one is 38 years old.

You might also want to quit SHOUTING IN YOUR WOULD-BE-NIFTY-IF-I-WERE-A-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD EMAILS IN ALL KINDS OF SUPER COOL FONTS, FONT SIZES, AND COLOURS!!!!!!! Freakshow.

It is also not a good idea to repeatedly shout at a person when meeting them for the first time. If you recall, "YOOOUUUUUU!!!!!!! YOU'RE THE REASON HE'S LEEEAAAAVVVVIIIIINNNGGG!!!!" intermittently shouted at me the entire evening when I met you: the accompanying finger point/wag was an especially endearing touch. You seem rather fond of this gesture: you did it again when you shrieked at the boy, "CHAT CHAT CHAT!!!! MUST MUST MUST!!!" that more recent day when you failed to notice we were both trying to ignore you. I resisted embarrassing you in front of your friend ("Hi G!"), but of course, as witnessed by many on numerous occasions and explained to me, and as clearly evident in your online rants (some of which are excerpted above), you never need any help with embarrassing yourself.

Skank, you sure make a piss poor first impression. Seems first impressions really are rarely wrong. I immediately had you pegged as an overcompensating loser - as the boy explained to you, I said I'd leave his friendship with you up to his judgment. Pity he gave you the benefit of doubt far too many times, and took a touch longer to come to his senses. Yes, he was an inordinately large horse's arse for not seeing through you but it is forgiven since, as pointed out to me, part of his naivety stemmed from what I love about him: "his loyalty, his belief in people... the way he treats women with such respect." He now has a keener sense of what kind of person is deserving of his time and respect.

The other part of his naivety stems from growing up in the lucky country, and his good fortune of having an abundance of great people of integrity and honour around him. Game-playing mind-fucking losers were the stuff of bad tv-dramas, not something he encountered on a regular basis. His guard was down (ill-advised for a life in Asia, and arguably, especially Shanghai), and he was far too trusting of you.

Having spent some time in Asia during my childhood years, and growing up in the lucky country with Asian extended family/acquiantances, my radar for game-playing mind-fuckers is far better tuned and I could smell you coming from a mile when you escalated your antics last year. Pity circumstances were such that I did not have the opportunity to confirm my suspicions about who you really were before that happened. From all the way in Melbourne, 8025 kilometers away, I chose to trust his judgment of you since, in the 11 years of our relationship, I had always liked and respected his close female friends (one of whom you became in 2007). We were both mistaken but we are both chalking this up to the vicissitudes of life. The positive in all this is that I am grateful the boy's eyes have now been opened even wider to the reality of life in Shanghai, where wolves skulk in sheep's clothing at every turn.
cheryl chong shanghai china chong poh kin

Shanghai-ed by CC the Singaporean Stalking Skank

2008-04-08T11:51:00.013+10:00

Was just about to get back into the swing of blogging but lo and behold, The Boy and I now have to deal with a stalking Skank. Yes, the same Skank as previously mentioned. We have just learned that it recently moved into our building.

The Boy ain't never livin this one down! At least I'll get plenty of mileage out of this debacle.

Boy: I want to watch X movie.
Me: I want to watch Y movie.
Boy: But X movie is better and I don't want to watch Y movie.
Me: Skank.
Boy: Shhhrmrmrmrmrmrmr

Me: Turn right up ahead.
Boy: No, it's a left.
Me: Skank.
Boy: Shhhmmrmrmrmrmrmrrr

Me: Let's go have hot-pot.
Boy: Blurgh! I hate hot-pot.
Me: Skank.
Boy: Shhhhmmrmrmrmrmrmrrrrr

Boy: Let's send our kids to Kendo class.
Me: But Aikido is better for them.
Boy: But Kendo rocks.
Me: But they'll be able to take down skanks with their bare hands.
Boy: true.

China is so adept at producing its legions of skanks (female and male), it really did not need to import one from Singapore. One just has to laugh...

Ahhhh... gotta love living in Asia. So many skanks, so little honour.
cheryl chong shanghai china chong poh kin

Histrionic Personality Disorder

2008-04-08T11:30:00.001+10:00

Note to Skank:

Individuals with Histrionic Personality Disorder exhibit excessive emotionalism--a tendency to regard things in an emotional manner--and are attention seekers. They have an overwhelming desire to be noticed, and often behave dramatically or inappropriately to get attention.

Behaviors may include constant seeking of approval or attention, self-dramatization, theatricality, and striking self-centeredness or sexual seductiveness in inappropriate situations, including social, occupational and professional relationships beyond what is appropriate for the social context.

They may be lively and dramatic and initially charm new acquaintances by their enthusiasm, apparent openness, or flirtatiousness. They commandeer the role of "the life of the party". Personal interests and conversation will be self-focused. They use physical appearance to draw attention to themselves. Their style of speech is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail.

They may do well with jobs that value and require imagination and creativity but will probably have difficulty with tasks that demand logical or analytical thinking.

Histrionic personality disorder does not usually affect the person's ability to function adequately in a superficial work or social environment. However, problems often arise in more intimate relationships, where deeper involvements are required.

Symptoms

* Excessive dramatics with exaggerated displays of emotion

* Self-centeredness, uncomfortable when not the center of attention

* Tendency to believe that relationships are more intimate than they actually are

* Constantly seeking reassurance or approval

* Displays rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotions

* Overly concerned with physical appearance / Consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self

* Interaction with others is often characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior

* Excessive sensitivity to criticism or disapproval

* Has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail

* Opinions are easily influenced by other people, but difficult to back up with details

* Low tolerance for frustration or delayed gratification

* Have difficulty maintaining relationships, often seeming fake or shallow in their dealings with others

People with this disorder are usually able to function at a high level and can be successful socially and at work. They may seek treatment for depression when romantic relationships end. They often fail to see their own situation realistically, instead tending to overdramatize and exaggerate. Responsibility for failure or disappointment is usually blamed on others.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Frances, et.al. (1995, p. 373) describes individuals with HPD as manipulative, vain, and demanding.

Akhtar (1992, p. 259) notes that the current description of HPD corresponds to the previous idea of an infantile personality. These individuals had few sexual inhibitions, were impulsive, experienced identity diffusion and emotional lability, and demonstrated what the author referred to as moral defects. Yet, as described in the DSM-IV, individuals with HPD demonstrate what our society tends to foster and admire -- to be well liked, successful, popular, extroverted, attractive, and sociable (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 366). In fact, Widiger, et.al. (Costa & Widiger, eds., 1994, p. 47) describe HPD as an extreme variant of extroversion. Extroversion involves the tendency to be outgoing, talkative, convivial, warm and affectionate, energetic, and vigorous. In a non-pathological form, extroversion is being high-spirited, buoyant, and optimistic. These factors coalesce into a personality disorder only when the needs behind the behavior are pathologically inflexible, repetitious, and persistent (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 366). It is then that the corruptibility, manipulativeness, and disinhibited exploitation of others become factors and the personality disordered version of extroversion becomes apparent.

Women with HPD are described as self-centered, self-indulgent, and intensely dependent on others. They are emotionally labile and cling to others in the context of immature relationships. Females with HPD over identify with others; they project their own unrealistic, fantasied intentions onto people with whom they are involved. They are emotionally shallow and have difficulty understanding others or themselves in any depth.

Individuals with HPD may decompensate in later adult years due to the cumulative effects of:
1) the incapacity to pursue personal, professional, cultural, and social values;
2) the frequent disruption of and failure in intimate relationships; and
3) identity diffusion.
These factors interfere with ordinary social learning and consequences grow more severe with age. The usual course of untreated HPD is precarious as life opportunities are missed or destroyed

Self-image

Individuals with HPD view themselves as gregarious, sociable, friendly, and agreeable. They consider themselves to be charming, stimulating, and well-liked. They value the capacity to attract people via their physical appearance and by appearing to be interesting and active people. For individuals with HPD, indications of internal distress, weakness, depression, or hostility are denied or suppressed and are not included in their sense of themselves (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 369).

For individuals with HPD, vanity and seductiveness function to bolster and maintain self-esteem; they often become overinvested in how they look and dread aging (McWilliams, 1994, pp. 312). Growing old violates the view of themselves as glamorous and attractive people who are admired by others.

Individuals with HPD are consumed with attention to superficialities and spend little time or attention on their internal life. Because they know themselves so little, they often have no sense of who they are apart from their identification with others. They are able to change their attitudes and values depending upon the views of significant others in their lives. These individuals also fail to attend the details and specifics of their experiences. They have, accordingly, memories that are diffuse and general with a tremendous lack of detail (Will, Retzlaff, ed., 1995, p. 99).

View of Others

Individuals with HPD focus on others to the point that they obtain their own identity from those to whom they are attached. Yet the attention they focus on others does not allow them to gain understanding of others or to become effectively empathic. Their intense observation skills are dedicated to determining what behaviors, attitudes, or feelings are most likely to result in winning the admiration and approval of others. Essentially, these individuals watch other people watch them. Their actual focus is on how they are doing and how they are being received by others. As a result, they are not particularly effective in understanding how others are feeling.

Individuals with HPD are inclined to define relationships with or connections to others as closer or more significant than they really are. They do not see when they are being humored or placated by people who may have lost patience with their relentless need for attention and the failure to relate in a genuine way. Others may eventually withhold their own efforts to relate to individuals with HPD once they become aware that there is no real attempt to connect -- rather there is a continuing demand to be attended to and admired.

Relationships

The HPD failure to view others realistically is reflected by their difficulties in developing and sustaining satisfactory relationships. Individuals with HPD tend to have stormy relationships that start out as ideal and end up as disasters (Beck, 1990, p. 214). These individuals are unable to tolerate isolation; when alone, they feel desperate and are unable to wait for new relationships to develop gradually (Horowitz, Horowitz, ed., 1991, p. 4). They will idealize the significant other early in the relationship and often see the connection as more intimate than it really is. If the significant others begin to distance themselves from the incessant demands, individuals with HPD will use dramatics and demonstrativeness to bind these people to the relationship. They will resort to crying, coercion, temper tantrums, assaultive behavior and suicidal gestures to avoid rejection (Beck, 1990, p. 51).

Even though individuals with HPD will attempt to bind others to them, they are often dissatisfied with single attachments. They tend to be lacking in fidelity and loyalty; they are seductive, dramatic, and capricious in personal relationships (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 357). Their interpersonal dependency is not expressed through faithfulness and commitment. They start relationships well but falter when depth and durability are needed. There is a paradox in HPD relationships of coercive dependency and infidelity.

Individuals with HPD have a strong fear of being ignored; they long to be loved and taken care of by someone who is both powerful and able to be controlled through the use of charm and seductiveness. They become helpless and childlike when faced with potential rejection (McWilliams, 1992, p. 307).

HPD Behaviour

Individuals with HPD are overreactive, volatile, provocative, and engaging in their behavior. They are intolerant of inactivity, impulsive, emotional, and responsive. They have a penchant for momentary excitements, fleeting adventures, and ill advised hedonism (Donat, Retzlaff, ed., 1995, p. 47). The HPD behavioral style is charming, dramatic, expressive, demanding, self-indulgent, and inconsiderate (Sperry, 1995, p. 97). They tend to be capricious, easily excited, and intolerant of frustration, delay, and disappointment. The words and feelings they express appear shallow and simulated rather than real or deep (Millon & Davis, 1996, pp. 366-367).

These individuals can be quite effective in situations where a first impression is important and vague expression of ideas is preferred over precision. They are less effective where performance is measured by objective measures of competence, diligence, thoroughness, and depth. Acting, marketing, politics, and the arts are fields where individuals with HPD will do well and manage competition effectively (Richards, 1993, p. 246).

The body, erotically or via illness, is often used by individuals with HPD to attract the attention of others (Horowitz, Horowitz, ed., 1991, p. 5). They will engage in inappropriately exaggerated smiles and continuous elaborate hand gestures. Movement and expressions are designed to have a pleasing effect (Turkat, 1990, pp. 72-73).

Individuals with HPD are fraudulent insofar as their inner emptiness is in contradiction to the impressions they seek to convey to others. They hide their true cognitive sterility and emotional poverty (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 370). HPD cognition is global, diffuse, and impressionistic; these individuals appear incapable of sustained intellectual concentration; they are distractable and suggestible (Beck, 1990, p. 215). They avoid introspective thought. They are attentive to fleeting and superficial events but integrate their experience poorly with a cursory cognitive style. They lack genuine curiosity and have habits of superficiality and dilettantism. They avoid potentially disruptive ideas and urges by dissociating from thoughts, people, and activities that threaten their view of themselves or the world (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 369).

Individuals with dependent personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder share important traits: they both turn to others for protection and the rewards of life; they are socially affable and share an intense need for attention and affection. Individuals with HPD have a more vigorous and manipulative style; these people will take the initiative in assuring that attention is forthcoming. They will actively solicit the interest of others through a series of seductive behaviors (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 357).

Affective Issues

Individuals with HPD express their emotions intensely yet remain unconvincing. They appear warm, charming, and seductive, yet their feelings appear to lack depth and genuineness (Beck, 1990, p. 213). They have an infantile quality in their emotional expression. They experience exaggerated feelings that change frequently. They become so involved in their emotional dramas that they are unaware of or are uninformed about the world they live in. They cannot stand frustration, disappointment, or delayed gratification (Oldham, 1990, pp. 143-144).

Individuals with HPD are subject to distortion in their emotional reasoning. They accept their emotions as evidence of truth rather than just a statement about their current emotional state (Will, Retzlaff, ed., 1995, p. 99).

People with HPD experience recurrent flooding of affect. Somatic preoccupations and sudden enraged, despairing, or fearful states may occur. Patience is rare and these individuals may use alcohol or other drugs to quickly alter states of negative feeling (Horowitz, Horowitz, ed., 1991, p. 4).

Defensive Structure

HPD defenses include dissociative mechanisms. Individuals with HPD regularly alter and recompose themselves to create a socially attractive but changing facade. They engage in self-distracting activities to avoid reflecting on and integrating unpleasant thoughts and feelings (Kubacki & Smith, Retzlaff, ed., 1995, p. 168). Repression is also a HPD defense; frequent splitting off from conscious awareness of self results in an intrapsychic impoverishment; psychological growth is precluded. These individuals remain immature and childlike in their behavior. Through repression, individuals with HPD remain unaware that their thoughts and feelings are attached to their behavior. Accordingly, they claim innocence when their conduct results in interpersonal conflict (Kubacki & Smith, Retzlaff, ed., 1995, p. 171).

Millon (Millon & Davis, 1996, pp. 369-370) also noted the HPD defense mechanisms of dissociation and repression. Individuals with HPD are attuned to external rather than internal events. They dissociate entire segments of memory and feelings that prompt discomfort. They, in particular, must keep away from awareness the triviality of their entire being, its pervasive emptiness and paucity of substance (Millon & Davis, 1996, pp. 369-370).

Alcohol & Drug Addiction

These individuals are prone to alcoholism and drug addiction and are quite adept at denying the related behaviors. They seek easy escape from pain, deny negative consequences, and fail to observe or accept responsibility for the impact of their behavior on others.

Richards (1993, pp. 227-239) believes that individuals with personality disorders have an increased inclination to use drugs and alcohol as alternative solutions to life problems. Faulty adaptation to normal stressors and frequent failures in self-regulation can be attributed to deficiencies or disturbances in the personality. This accounts for continued addiction even in the face of catastrophic negative consequences.

For individuals with HPD, the shallowness and absence of internal integration are mirrored in a superficial involvement in the details of life; they have little ability to understand and integrate emotional experiences across situations. Alcohol and drugs serve as an alternative to personality integration and increased maturity. This is particularly effective for individuals with HPD because drug use facilitates dissociative behavior. Not only will they use drugs and alcohol for self-regulation and as a self-soothing alternative to facing life problems, they will view themselves as victims to their addiction. They often cycle rapidly between the role of enraptured drug user and the victimized person suffering from the illness of addiction (Richards, 1993, pp. 240-247).

Millon & Davis (1996, p. 378) state that individuals with HPD may become involved in drug or alcohol abuse because the substances can free them to act out in ways that are congenial to their inclination to be stimulus-seeking. Through drugs and alcohol, these individuals are able to transform themselves; they gain feelings of well-being, bolster a flagging sense of self-worth, and perhaps even come to feel omnipotent. Drugs and alcohol can disinhibit controlled HPD impulses so that there need be no assumption of personal responsibility or guilt for behavior.

Individuals with HPD are vulnerable to addiction via their immaturity, inclination to avoid unpleasantness, and stimulus-seeking behavior. They define themselves as victims to their addiction and describe themselves as powerless, not over addiction, but in relation to recovery. These individuals usually have little experience in recognizing and tolerating the painful in life. They do not define reality as a positive force; they are much more inclined to prefer the fantasies they have about both themselves and others.

Richards (1993, p. 278) notes that individuals with HPD will demand to be special in treatment. They are inclined to become the star patient in a treatment group or the problem child due to relapse. They may also, consciously or not, view service providers (or their group) and their drug(s) of choice as jealous lovers fighting over them and for their allegiance. This is a situation these individuals tend to relate to with relish (Richards, 1993, pp. 247-248).

Dual Diagnosis and the Histrionic Personality Disorder