Month: July 2005

Differentiation

As I have commented on and whinged about before, I find myself yearning for more from life. I keen for more adventure. I desire to be more significant. I loathe the notion of dying as nothing more than a piece of unnecessary punctuation buried unread within the tomes of history. I want to be a tome (or at least a paragraph).

I watch TV, I read books, I play games, I see movies, and they always leave me wanting to take up swords, or guns, or fists, or armies, and fight the valiant fight, right the myriad injustices, and make of myself a leader and a hero. More than just a man.

At this point it is interesting to note that while my mind rales against my mediocrity, my mundanity, and my lifes predictable sustainability, my brain points out that the very uneventfulness of my life has seen me already outlast the average life expectancy of humans only a few hundred years ago, and sees me in good health, with food on the plate, a house to live in, and all the commodities and conveniences that a stable, structured (and inherently boring-enough-to-make-you-cry) society affords.

(But sometimes that predictability and convenience really is quite spectacularly depressing)

They’ve got it all wrong

I’ve never thought about it before, but it occurs to me that someone got it all wrong when they were naming a couple of things.

Firstly we have to consider undies. This is of course a common and perfectly reasonable contraction of the term “underwear”, which also makes sense, given that is worn under your other clothes.

The problem arises however when you consider that (on women at least) the undies go over the overies (OK, I’m corrupting the spelling there to support my argument, but hopefully you understand where I’m coming from).

So which is it. Are the overies over, or are the undies over, and if the undies are over the overies how do we reconcile that so that it doesn’t break my brain when I try and think about it too hard…

Seemingly unkillable

I flicked through the MTV music awards last night in time to hear something really disturbing.

Mariah Carey was performing live on the show, on the basis that she currently has the top single and album on the US charts.

I had always assumed that she was a one album wonder, but she seems to be remarkably adept at being a one album wonder again and again and again. What are we up to now? Like, the fourth incarnation or something like that..

I can only conclude that either she is either sleeping with all the right people (again and again and again) or else she must be onto like her 4th or 5th deal with the devil…

Infestation

Our flat appears to be being somewhat invaded, however it isn’t something that at all warrants complaining about.

Whereas other people get ants, who get into everything and steal your sugar, or spiders who sneak around trying to give you a fright (like George, the huntsman spider who lived in my flat in second year for a while (he was kinda cute, friendly, and utterly harmless, so I let him be)), we are being invaded by geckos, which I just think is cool.

(I should probably mention at this point that we do have ants and spiders too, but the ants only ever show up in ones and twos in our bath tub, which is hardly exactly an invasions or even an annoyance, and we have a few daddy longlegs spiders in the top corners of the front room, which I personally feel is just being ecologically responsible, as they take care of any bugs that wander in doors, and otherwise leave us alone, meaning we generaly don’t have to worry about bug spray)

Anyhow, we don’t really get many geckos in NZ and so having them wandering around our flat (presumably just as a part of a larger exploration of the neighbourhood) seems pretty cool, and I think Simone derives quite some amusement at my excitement whenever I see a gecko scampering up a wall or across a door.

I suppose we’ve all got to have our eccentricities (although I had thought that I had already filled my quota before this all started…..)

Grumpy old folk

This evening there appeared on the ABC a BBC show called Grumpy old Women, which I had assumed was a follow up to another wildly funny BBC show called Grumpy old men, but it was not.

Instead, it was just plain pathetic.

Where the grumpy old men had fulfilled their claim, vocally proclaiming their dislike (in relatively equal measures) from mobile phones, fast food, modern music, contemporary politics, teenage fashion, and, well the list went on. The grumpy old women on the other hand simply seemed to solely winge about men. Oh, and claim that they were somehow inherently better than men (although with no particular evidence other than their whinging opinions).

It basically came across as a bunch of worn out womens lib veterans trying to justify their continued bitterness at the world.

Magnetty fun

Something that caught my eye on a link off a link off Slashdot* and which seemed pretty damn cool was some guys experimenting with ferrofluids. You can get some really cool patterns when you apply a strong magnet to a bunch of small ferrous particles suspended in a fluid.

* Slashdot and wikipedia link jumping has become one of my main and favorite pastimes online. It’s surprising what cool stuff these two sites link to (whether it’s interesting articles on wikipedia, which contain links to other interesting articles ad infinitum, or reference links within Slashdot posts, which themselves contain interesting stuff, or contain links to other interesting stuff)

It’s pronounced “nukular”

One of the things that has been in the news a disproportionate amount recently, and which has been provoking much thought in me has been the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, and America’s objection to it.

I can’t ever get past the feeling that it’s terribly arrogant and hipocritical of America to say “We don’t trust you with a single nuclear weapon, and we don’t ever really trust you to simply run a civilian nuclear program for generating power”, while at the same time insisting on maintaining a stockpile of something like 4000 nuclear warheads themselves.

If they were in the process of actively reducing their nuclear stockpile towards some goal like 50 or 100 weapons (which would still be plenty enough to continue threatening people with…) then sure, saying “We don’t want you to have nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are bad, and we’re also getting rid of most of ours as well” might seem a little more reasonable.

As it stands it seems that the Iranians have a legitimate reason for wanting a nuclear power plant, and a reasonable arrangement with the russians where the russians sell the iranians nuclear power plant fuel, and the iranians send their nuclear waste back to Russia for processing, which allows for confirmation that no fuel has been retained by the iranians.

All up it’s almost as bad as the US continuing to say “We want a free trade pact with China” while also trying to tell everyone (particularly the Europeans) that they’re not allowed to sell military technology to the Chinese. I mean either China is a bad coutry, and no trade sould be entered into with it, or else it is accepted as a legitimate nation that you can trade (whatever goods you want to) with.

It all just seems that American foreign policy revolves around not letting anyone else get big enough to challenge it. Now I don’t like China, but on some levels It’d be very satisfying to see them get big enough to push America around for a change. (although a strong European Union would be my preferred choice for contender of course)

Patron saint

Turns out that surgeons and physicians have not one but two patron saints.

Sts. Cosmos & Damian

I haven’t quite figured what if any practical use I am going to make of this particular piece of knowledge, but I’m sure something will come up sooner or later.

Y2K?

One of the things which has been confusing me whenever I go into one particular room in the birthing quite is how a towel heater which almost certainly has nothing more complex in it than a couple of resistors, a bilayer metal temperature switch, some rheostats, perhaps some transistors, and a pile of wire in it could require, and indeed eventually receive not one but two “Y2K compliant” stickers….

PSP casting

Previously I have mentioned the concept of Podcasting (which appears to have rather take off quite madly since I wrote about it) and today I had an additional idea occur to me.

Now podcasting revolves around the iPod, and as such is just an audio thing, but the recently realeased Play Station Portable (PSP) has the ability to play back movies, and what I wondered as when people are going to start distributing video blog entries, short documentries, video news, and so on, which can be uploaded to a PSP for viewing at a later point such as on the train or in boring lectures….