captions

iraq prisoners tortured by "gay" desert conga line

german carmaker's new suv can hold
"twice as much pope" as other models

despite terrorist explosion white dude still manages
to maintain a steady newspaper arm tuck

airbus reveals it newest, hugest, airliner model,
capable of felling three towers at once

dutch cartoon depiction of an ancient macaque
sparks major protests by evolutionists worldwide

huh

the older i get the more i realize the truth behind all those cliches i swore were fallacies when i went through that "i'm so intellectual" phase in college. i mean, i still swear by my intellect on a heartbeat, but have no need to be "an intellectual." college, academia in general, is wonderful yet so unreal. i feel it delays the onset of a certain kind of maturity. perhaps that maturity involves some resignation that life is happening and you have to perform tasks for money to live it when you'd rather be amongst an ensemble of thinking people whose only pressures are getting their ideas in on time and having too many friends.

oddly enough

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a sunday night with matlab

paraboloid... Z = (Y²/b²) + (X²/a²)

hyperbolic paraboloid... Z = (Y²/b²) - (X²/a²)

the logarithmic spiral

a shell? a cyclone? a galaxy? a sunday night with matlab?

r = a*e^bθ

perspective

a two-dimensional view above shows only a circle,
hiding the helix that evolves with time below...

the view above shows a seeming chaos in motion,
hiding the order that exists in two dimensions below...

always change your perspective. you might see something spectacular.


[for the 3d stuff in matlab... t = 0:pi/50:12*pi; plot3(sin(t),cos(t),t); plot3(sin(1.2*t),cos(t),t);]

q.o.t.d

i don't run from responsibility anymore... it's more like i slip away while responsibility isn't looking.

--- Z

doing the numbers

between the 19th and the 23rd of may approximately 2200 H1-B visa petitions were submitted. data. so let's say we use a lower bound of 440 petitions submitted per day. there are about 13,000 spots left so assuming a constant rate of beneficiary accrual the cap will be reached about one month from today. the implications here are that employers already know these facts after consulting their immigration lawyers, hence their hesitation to hire a foreign person at this stage in the cycle, no matter the qualifications.

taking all this into consideration, moving to new york in late june to continue the job search is no longer logical. or rather, it was "logical" before only because i did not have this information factored into the probabilities. the further implication is that i should therefore allocate more time and effort to thinking about the job search in trinidad, which, if i'm smart about it, means i should head there as soon as possible when work in the US is finished. that would preclude the rounds i wanted to make on the east coast to visit close friends. but i can't be sad about it, gotta be smart about survival.

hmmm. i'm doing all these numbers because i have to buy a plane ticket to leave cali pretty soon. the question is destination.

q.o.t.d(s)

The same thing happened with my boyfriend and me, sort of. As soon as I agreed to give up my virginity, he agreed to remove me from his personal list of state-sponsors of terrorism.

--- Sara Flume, Personal Shopper

Beloved is just another example of angry minorities trying to do away with the canon by generating moving works of literary genius.

--- Syd Green, Tailor

(ze onion)

learn a lesson in love

my office mate found this article from 1973 in the library archives.
maybe it's mean, but i can't not laugh.

science notes

human psychiatric diseases such as depression and schizophrenia are accompanied by synaptic functional disorders. can viruses play a role in neurobehavioural disease? perhaps: research results showing viral interference with neuronal functioning. imagine if they were to find viral involvement in things like autism or sexual identity...

~~~

mathematicians and physicists will bring us invisibility soon enough. unfortunately you may not be able to see the results. at first glance this almost amazed me but i figured "invisibility" should not be an awe inducing concept. it's just physics. it involves things like meta-materials, plasmonic coating, and anomalous localized resonance.

oh dear

33% of MIT males are single.
21% of MIT females are single.

9% of MIT males are looking for whatever they can get.

well, at least it's not 90%. i wonder what the national average is. judging from the size of the porn industry i'd say perhaps MIT males are actually doing ok.

oldest trick in the book

taken from MIT Facebook's Pulse (trends):

2% of MIT females are in an open relationship.
1% of MIT males are in an open relationship.

for kicks, assuming that every MIT female in an open relationship is dating an MIT male in an open relationship, this says that on average the "open" classification is just a way guys get girls to let them sleep with other girls.

inEquality

"The total net worth of all Americans in 1989 was $25 trillion (in 2004 dollars). Of that amount, the top 1 percent owned 30 percent, or $7.775 trillion. The bottom half owned 3 percent of the total, or $763 billion.

Fifteen years later, in 2004, the total wealth of all Americans had doubled to $50.25 trillion. The top 1 percent of the population now owns 33.4 percent of the total, or $16.774 trillion. Their percentage share of the total has increased by more than 3 percent in fifteen years. At the same time, the total wealth owned by the bottom 50 percent increased to $1.278 trillion, but its percentage of total wealth declined from 3 percent to 2.5 percent in the same time period."

See Article.

economic (or social) mobility is as much a myth as democracy and freedom, existing only nominally, in relative comparison to poor states, but not in any absolute terms. my opinion. disagree? how much of the wealth protected by laws and wars belongs to you? call me if you wanna bitch about it and then we can buy our discussion from the NSA ipod store.

keep the bottom half ignorant or supplicant. they probably won't riot for another 50 years or so. not to worry anyway. america will be much more of a police state by then.

boyhood dreams

latest news

caucasian teen seeking acceptance longs to be racially profiled, kills self on receiving several corporate job offers after his first job application

vatican inadvertently posts christ's return on public google calendar, christ declines vatican's invitation to return, citing "lack of any real possibility"

recuerdos de la alhambra

i've been trying to find this piece of guitar music since the fugees sampled it for "family business". but i never knew the name until today. so unlearned in classical music am i. i should have just asked my sister. now i am binge listening to it.

overheard in a dark alley

Guy with Guy mask: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

Damsel: Are you like a crazy person?

Guy with Guy mask: I'm quite sure they will say so.

q.o.t.d

A building is nothing more than a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by people. A symbol, in and of itself is powerless, but with enough people behind it, blowing up a building can change the world.

--- V

remember, remember, the fifth of november

i realize that trying to give an objective assessment of a movie is a futile endeavour. but i thought V for Vendetta was excellent. (whether it's a good movie is another question?) maybe i'm just an anarchist at heart, excited to pretend for a couple hours that i am not a conformist by action.

trivia: the word "guy" is partially derived from the name of would be parliament bomber Guy Fawkes. if it weren't for him americans would be saying "bloke" and "chap" instead.

whitey worries

so apparently john gibson on fox news made a not so subtle recommendation to folks of european ancestry (real americans) to do their duty and make more babies! his reason for concern: a study claiming that half of the children under 5 in this country are minorities.

awww. no wonder they're sending troops to the border, poor folks. they're scared. i guess that's karma for what their ancestors did to the originial americans.

sidenote, sort of relevant conspiracy theory: catholic leaders label contraception sinful so that religious believers can reproduce explosively and save a diminishing church body.

sidenote, sort of relevant random thought: comparing developed country population growth rates to those of developing countries... jesus of nazareth must have been an expert at population demographics when he predicted that "the meek will inherit the earth."

sensitive are we?

i wonder if any of the christians protesting the da vinci code book/movie around the world at present had anything to say about the muslims protesting the danish cartoons back in the day. if you did, mr christian, how does it feel to be on the receiving end of faith insult? regardless, if your "faith" can be threatened by a work of fiction then its very foundation must be intellectually untenable and you should probably question it.

i thought the book was ok. i mean, it was indeed a fun page turner at the time but not really memorable in any way.

q.o.t.d. 2

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

--- T.S.Eliot.

q.o.t.d.

Obesity is based on the first law of thermodynamics.

--- Emory University biologist Timothy J. Bartness

q.o.t.d

as a poet might say, she was the kind of woman you just wanna have sex with over and over

--- Peter Griffin

the legal way

i was reading a bbc comments section discussing the immigration situation and i saw this statement from a reader:

"I can't blame illegal immigrants for wanting to come here. But neither can I blame myself for wanting them to go home. Please immigrate the legal way."

this guy is absolutely on point. immigrants, we won't call your real name, you really do need to learn how to immigrate the LEGAL way. it's not that difficult. don't cross the border from the south, that's just not a good look! instead shackle your fittest men and put them at the bottom of some dank wooden ships in the atlantic. this way the REAL americans will let you do all the work you want and more! and then when they require another generation of workers they will send for an adequate number of female child-bearers to replenish your stock.

you'll have lots to look forward to as second class citizenship is institutionalized into your society and inequality of opportunity lowers the bar for your children. yes, immigrants, all of this can be achieved within the limits of the law, which - as evidenced by words and sentences in the constitution - has been the ultimate authority on equality of men since the good old days when we could keep the missus in line with the rule of thumb. so please, immigrants, do it the legal way.

and pay no heed to lady liberty's misprint: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." the message was lost in translation because it was probably typed by a gay-ass french man. here is the original: "Give your tired, your poor, your huddled masses the wretched refuse. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to the door."

for a clearer conceptualization see the example below:

q.o.t.d

"Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts exercise, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision."

--- Dickens

(Thanks to Zach for these heights.)

life planning in the office

if i was born with the resources and conditions to do whatever i want it would involve some interconnected combination of physics, neuroscience, psychology and mathematics. and of course two turn tables and a microphone. and some ghostwriting for wu tang. hopefully though i'll be at peace with the fact that life's too finite, its events too uncontrollable, its exigencies too demanding, to be able to accomplish all the things that i think would make me incredibly "happy".

BUT

i can live vicariously through wikipedia... the topic of today being psych: cognitive biases. i'm trying to learn some of these terms so i can accurately describe a faulty thought process when someone proselytizes to me or when i soliloquize cuz there's nothing on TV. so when a brown bwoy in baggy jeans and a bob marley tshirt drops jewels in the midst of some ivy leaguers' conversation they experience some cognitive dissonance if they're predisposed to stereotyping tendencies. why do i love doing that? (there's something puerile about it.) i need to find me some regular hobbies. like a soul sucking job.

just the Word

a faceless prophet, of whom all visual portrayal is forbidden...

if i were creating a figurehead for a religious code of belief i too would include this among the stipulations. why? because religion, at its practical heart, has good intentions of encouraging man to allow higher faculties to dominate lower animal brain from which he evolved. if man is to engage philosophical ideas purely through intellect he must not be distracted by the neurological response to visual stimuli. that is, if the message is important the messenger must not be allowed to impact the perception of the message. if the messenger has a face then the average human brain will respond to it according to how its dna allows it to; the integrity of the message might be lost amidst reactions to characteristics such as ethnicity and attractiveness.

as an atheist and psuedo physicist i make a point to look at useful ideas from religion. underlying ideas aside though, it's all a matter of individual perspective. sadly it is the literalistic interpretation of allegory that often ruins religion's efficacy.

Dr Fernandes!

fingers crossed

waiting on word.

tense days.

brings a smile to my face every time

"Your resume is impressive. Do you hold a Green card? Or an H-1?"

--- HR Rep #7, and counting


one of the many reasons i firmly believe initial conditions and reality constraints determine the majority of human trajectories. a stamp of approval can be worth more than, well, one's actual worth.

captions

cyborg elephant comes from future to prevent birth of indian elephant trainer

in bid to boost membership, catholic church endorses Ahmadinejad's version of Islam

q.o.t.d

yankee membership? you've already nailed a white girl, what more do you want, citizenship?

--- new-yen

miles

lots and lots of them slipping by underneath our feet. and all for bread and butter. i was thinking on the flight back from the interview. too many miles are traveled around the globe without the worlds that fill them duly acknowledged.

made me think

today, while on the shuttle to work, a man got on as non-chalantly as anyone else and sat down quietly, on his way to work too perhaps. this man was blind, and as if the fates had had it in for him, his face was horribly disfigured - mouth and nose misshapen with long scars - leading me to the conclusion that he was in some kind of terrible accident once. that this man chooses everyday to continue living despite the struggle he must go through in terms of the reaction of the humans around him, is simply amazing.

today, while at work in my office, i received an email saying that a woman who worked at the law cafe where i often get sandwiches for lunch was hit by a car while heading home last friday and died from her injuries over the weekend. she has two kids, 8 and 10, and her family can't even afford to have her body shipped back to mexico. i couldn't eat at the law cafe today.

today i felt ashamed of myself for ever entertaining self-pity.