Cubbi
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cubbi's LiveJournal:
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| Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 5:53 pm |
I know who the real father of science fiction is!
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Jules Verne got brought up in an IRC conversation, and I started remembering his novels. Honestly, I never cared for his quaint science fiction, as awesome as it was from historical point of view (air conditioning, TV, and the Internet in the 19th century!), but his adventure novels completely swept my imagination. Captain Hatteras, Fifteen-year-old captain, Captain Nemo, Children of Captain Grant, various explorers, pirates, scientists, and tribesmen.
In fact, his Mysterious Island is what made me a chemist: the true hero of the story was a engineer, who made everything, from steel to dynamite, out of raw materials. Odd how few people around me have even heard of that novel, although they all know about Captain Nemo (who meets his end in the Island) |
and now, anthrocon. Current Mood:  thoughtful | | Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | | 12:26 pm |
| | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 10:25 pm |
What would I do without eBay?
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Guess what I got this time? A 1918 printing of the first edition of both Jungle Books! In solid red leather binding with gold designs. And, the weirdest thing, which I didn't know until I've opened them, the books are inscribed to someone who had their birthday on February 18th, 1919. Which is also my birthday, just a bit before my time. Weird, huh?
I've read the russian translation of the Mowgli Stories when I was about six, before seeing any sort of cartoons, and was completely taken by the idea of living wild. Grown-up, I've been finding influences of that book in my psyche all over the place. So I decided to feed this little old fancy with a nifty 90 year old treat, even though I have all the Mowgli stories (including In The Rukh, not found in the JBs) already.
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Current Mood:  bouncy | | Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | | 4:04 pm |
Even when the media is pro-science, it does it disservice.
This image is Fig. 1A of the PLoS ONE article |
What the news say:
Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution ... Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.
What the researchers actually say:
Morphological characteristics preserved in Darwinius masillae enable a rigorous comparison with the two principal subdivisions of living primates: Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini. Defining characters of Darwinius ally it with early haplorhines rather than strepsirrhines. We do not interpret Darwinius as anthropoid, but the adapoid primates it represents deserve more careful comparison with higher primates than they have received in the past. |
upd: I beat PZ Myers by one minute in posting this! His post is much longer, though. upd: looks like the researchers may have hyped it up themselves, off-paper. Way to lose face. Current Mood:  busy | | Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | | 6:17 pm |
| | Sunday, April 19th, 2009 | | 12:17 pm |
Umhir deln Fshofth, du saq mishallfen
I've insanely busy at work lately, and to counter the stress I've been entertaining myself by replaying the computer games of the early 90s using dosbox. Star Control 2, Ultima series, Civilization, Eye of the Beholder... I've got over a thousand of them. I think I am going to try and seriously play Wizardry 7 (1992) this time, having rolled some good chars and having finished the beginner dungeon for the first time. But I started replaying The Summoning, the old sequel to the even older DarkSpyre, and remembered something awesome about that game. The way the spells were cast!
You see, in most games magic spells are choices in a pull-down menu, especially in AD&D inspired ones. In some old games, however, the player has to actually cast them, by remembering/writing down how to do each spell. In the Ultima series, spells were sequences of Futhark-inspired runes (for example, to cast Armageddon, the Avatar had to say "Vas Corp Bet Mani"). In Loom (Lucasarts, 1990), spells were composed of musical notes (different in different replays, and at expert level, they had to be heard and identified by ear).
In The Summoning (Event Horizon, 1992), spells are sequences of hand gestures. Flame Arrow is a half-closed fist, then tight fist. Liquefy is open palm at 45 degrees, then straight.
Do any modern games have spellcasting that's not just choose-from-a-menu? |
Current Mood:  cheerful | | Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | | 6:59 pm |
Writer's Block: Taxmen and Poetry
This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet Current Mood: busy | | Sunday, April 12th, 2009 | | 12:17 pm |
Hail Eástre!
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It is the time to celebrate old goddess of spring light and fertility Eástre, whose month Eostur-mónaþ has now begun! Feast on hare pies in her honor and do what hares do! And I hope you didn't forget to paint your eggs red for the Zoroastrian celebration of No Ruz, which was a couple weeks ago! Isn't it interesting how rituals from across the world mix and mingle? |
Current Mood: mellow | | Saturday, March 14th, 2009 | | 1:08 am |
| | Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 | | 5:30 pm |
on a more entertaining note
on a more entertaining note, some bored scientists in England decided to make a virtual reality helmet with a smell tube and something that squirts flavors directly into your mouth, as Daily Mail reports. Apparently they even have a prototype already. Current Mood:  amused | | 5:17 pm |
that crazy NYPD cop and other people unfit to do their jobs
So the NYPD lieutenant from Queens, named Maglione, who once reported seeing a "demon" at police headquarters and urinated on himself because he refused to stop praying to go to the bathroom, is suing New York City to get his gun and shield back, claiming supervisors took them from him because of his religious practices. news story hereWhile his lawsuit is, hopefully, ridiculous enough to be dismissed (after all, he was discharged by the medical board, not by an evil anti-christian supervisor), a lot of people in the USA refuse doing the jobs they've signed up for, citing religious conflict, from Muslim grocery store workers who don't touch alcohol or pork (even vacuum-sealed) to Christian pharmacists who refuse selling the contraception or that nurse, Sylvia Olona, who had a habit of forcefully removing female contraception devices from her patients. And all those people are actually protected from being fired by several state legislatures and one of the last executive orders of Bush administration. What's also scary is that Maglione was on the force for 22 years. Current Mood: busy | | Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 | | 12:15 am |
you have gained a level!
Hey, it's my 33rd birthday today! Also on this day were born: Alessandro Volta, the physicist who invented the electric battery Ernst Mach, the physicist who calculated supersonic travel and formulated a principle that inspired Einstein Harry Brearley, the metallurgist who invented stainless steel Hans Asperger, the pediatrician who discovered a disorder that turned children into "little professors" Current Mood: cheerful | | Friday, February 13th, 2009 | | 6:27 pm |
Not as cool as 0xdeadbeef, but...
cubbi@gummadoon ~ $ date +%s
1234567890
cubbi@gummadoon ~ $
(LOL on Freenode's ##1234567890 there are 1260+ people right now, celebrating) Current Mood:  geeky | | Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | | 9:04 am |
Happy Darwin Day!
So today is the 200th anniversary of Darwin, the British naturalist who first created a detailed, rigorous, and lucid account of then emerging theory of common descent and natural selection, which provided a solid explanation for the facts of biological evolution that were known back then and managed to correctly predict thousands of the future observations. Although nearly everything we know about evolution today did not come from Darwin, and he'd never understand a word in a modern research paper, his work is the underlying basis of modern biology much like Newton's laws of motion are the basis of modern physics. And yet I live in the only non-islamic country in the world where the nutcases who think that all of the modern biology is wrong are not a ridiculous minority, but comprise 40%-60% of general population (Miller et al. (2006) Science 313:765-766 say 40-45%, Pew Research Center says 63%). Their leaders and spokesmen not just make stuff up and pass it as some sort of secret truth, they publish books, make movies, built a museum, and continually attempt to force the schools to teach their lies. Major league politicians and celebrities openly confess their ignorance. If you run into a creationist, an IDer, or one of their ilk online, make sure to have http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/ open in your browser, because their claims are almost never original, and have been debunked before. As for some cool recent discoveries, check out the early and later whale ancestors or the turtle ancestor, or the new work on the evolution of hair. Current Mood: busy | | Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 | | 6:44 am |
terror and math
I forgot who gave me the link to this Russian LJ post, mostly based on the 2003 book The Degaev Affair , but I must say, it is quite awesome. It's about the russian mathematician Alexander Pell, who joined the newly established University of South Dakota in 1901, shortly after getting his degree from Johns Hopkins University, was adored by the students, became the first dean of the university's College of Engineering in 1907, which he created. He discovered a gifted student Anna Johnson who he married in 1908 and went to Chicago with her, and he died in Bryn Mawr in 1921. The USD still has Dr. Alexander Pell scholarship for gifted math undergrads. To quote one of his students, "he was one of the most human men I have ever known".
But guess who he was before moving to the USA? Born in 1857 as Sergey Degaev, he joined the Russian terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya and became its high-ranking member by 1880. In 1882 Narodnaya Volya successfully assassinated Czar Alexander II of Russia. After an arrest, Degaev betrayed his organization to the chief of okhrana (secret police) G.Sudeikin (father of Serge Sudeikin) for the promise of the second position in the new shadow government that Sudeikin was supposedly going to lead by means of controlled terror. Over 2000 members were eventually put on trial, but Degaev, seeing that Sudeikin was not fulfilling any promises, murdered him in the trend-setting ice-axe-to-the-head manner (see the murder of Leon Trotsky), and submitted himself to the mercy of the other terrorists in 1883, who spared his life, but banished him from Russia and from politics forever.
Isn't America great?
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Current Mood: geeky | | Friday, January 23rd, 2009 | | 11:45 pm |
New favorite figurine
 Attakus makes INSANELY detailed figurines! This is Nävis as she appears in the comic book series of the same name, prequel to the famous Sillage, and she's done very faithfully to José-Luis Munuera's design (as opposed to Philippe Buchet's design figurine, which I also have :) It's my new favorite figurine ever, so much detail and complexity! And only 350 made... The pics are from the box because I lost my camera's cable. Current Mood: bouncy | | Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 | | 2:08 pm |
obligatory post about Obama's inauguration
I didn't care to watch it, knowing that it will have priests in it (how ridiculous is that?), that Obama is president effective 12:00 noon regardless of what transcribes at the ceremony (although too bad I missed the "president to the United States faithfully" mess-up), and that it will have the stupid "So help me God", which, by the way, was never used by U.S. presidents until well into the 20th century, with the single exception of Chester Arthur; I fully support the lawsuit that attempted to bar Roberts from instructing the president to say that. I liked this blog on the subject, and, in particular, this australian's comment: "It seems that american political life has a parasite called overt christian god talk and another called sickening patriotism and it seems to be the price that all political figures no matter how progressive have to pay." Current Mood: busy | | Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | | 11:19 pm |
| | Thursday, December 25th, 2008 | | 12:37 pm |
IO SATVRNALIA is so last year, how about Merry Modraniht?
The Anglo-Saxon year begins with the Yule-tide feasts (Modranect, or Mother's Night), in which warriors make their vows for the coming year (the origin of New Year's resolutions). As well as celebrating Midwinter, Modranect also marked the birth of Ing (Proto-Germanic *Ingwaz, meaning "son"), one of the three sons of Mannus (meaning "man"), and the progenitor of all North Sea germanic people (Frisians, Saxons, Jutes, and Angles).
As the often-quoted Bede said, Modranect/módraniht was observed on the very same day as Christmas, although I am pretty sure it was observed all over december/january with the rest of Yuletide, and was only set to 24th/25th of December when Julian calendar was adopted. | 
The sons of Mannus (Ing, Irmin, Istaev) in the 1893 edition of the Poetic Edda. Some people say these three became known later as Freyr (aka Yngvi), Odin (aka Jormun), and Thor. |
Current Mood: cheerful | | Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | | 9:46 pm |
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