Cubbi

Halloween 2009

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:52:03 GMT

Hey, tomorrow is Halloween (longislanders, btw, party at our house!) and it will be 7 years since I walked out of JFK airport with a giant suitcase full of clothes, books, and hard drives. It's amazing how much stuff happened to me since then.
Now let's see how much candy can I eat today before the trick-o-treaters come tomorrow.

ocaml got really lazy now

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:44:04 GMT

Redesigning and ~~managing the team of~~ rewriting by myself the C++ core of all software we make at work, from scratch, stirred up my interest in programming to the point that I started randomly writing programs during ~~free time~~ commute to work. Guess what, ocaml, the one functional language practical enough to be used in real world. from science to file sharing, and good enough to have been stolen by Microsoft, finally learned how to do infinite lazy lists while I wasn't looking. What used to take half a page of hand-crafted code fiddling with explicit lazy constructors and forced calls, is now done like this:
list of all integer numbers above zero:
value naturals = let rec n a = fstream [: `a; n (a+1) :] in n 1;
list of all fibonacci numbers:
value fibs = let rec f a b = fstream [: `a; f b (a + b) :] in f 0 1;

And yes, in case anyone reading this is into programming like me, I know Haskell had infinite lists for 19 years, but Haskell is not for real world, plus these little "fstream" constructs from ocaml allow much crazier stuff done to them, by means of functional and backtracking parsers.

Li Wei

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:23:52 GMT

I totally forgot on whose lj (if it was lj) I saw a link to Li Wei's photography, these days I'm so busy at work I cannot remember what I had for breakfast. But hey, he's pretty crazy with his imagination and the ability to take a picture like that with no photoshopping. Even though he has a bizarre habit of falling into things head first - he makes one lousy superhero.

Microscopes show C-H bonds now O.o

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:06:29 GMT

As BBC reports on this article in Science published by a bunch of crazy IBM researchers from Zurich, atomic force microscopes can be tuned so insanely well now that even C-H bonds become (kinda) visible! (the molecule on the picture is pentacene)
(The first picture is from IBM press release, the second picture is taken (and greatly reduced in size) from Science 325, 1110 (2009), without permission)

thought of the weekend

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:02:04 GMT

More laser tag arenas should have mirrors, it adds a whole new dimension to the game.

Guess where we went today

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 07:32:30 GMT

Cut for the big spoiler pic!

Fried chicken and champagne!

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:39:47 GMT

I had to go to Austin for a quick business trip, and out of the patchwork of places I went to eat, I liked best the brand new eating establishment there on San Jacinto and 3rd, called Max's Wine Dive, which was still open at midnight and served some rather nice food. And I could watch them cook it. And their slogan sums them best: "Fried chicken and Champagne? Why the hell not!?"

Also, I have now participated in Space Balls Quote-a-thon at the Alamo. Austin is Wierd.

A C++ epiphany

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:43:02 GMT

boost::asio::async_read_until is the best invention since std::vector!

I know who the real father of science fiction is!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:33:42 GMT

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.

Well, I'm ever upper class high society...

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:39:10 GMT

Happy Summer Solstice and the National Go Commando Day (at least according to the now defunct www.lcnc.net)

What would I do without eBay?

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:45:16 GMT

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.

Even when the media is pro-science, it does it disservice.

Tue, 19 May 2009 20:08:52 GMT

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.

They are after flash games now?

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:18:36 GMT

So Organization for Islamic Conference pressured Molleindustria into removing the flash game Faith Fighter from their web site. But it's still perfectly playable on newgrounds, and thanks to this publicity, I gave it a couple rounds, too.

Fun, although too short.

Umhir deln Fshofth, du saq mishallfen

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:00:56 GMT

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?

Writer's Block: Taxmen and Poetry

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:01:00 GMT

It's Tax Day in the U.S., a day when the mind might be too occupied with deductions and long lines at the post office to think about poetry. But let's try: what's your favorite line of poetry? Song lyrics count.

View 500 Answers

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

Hail Eástre!

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:42:44 GMT

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?

in case you were curious where those trophies come from...

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:15:42 GMT

So I went to one of the NYTKL (New York Traditional Karate League) tournaments last sunday, and did all right, I suppose. Won the first round in kata with tomari-bassai:

Lost the second round with seyenchin

Got second place.

Then I went up at kumite, my really weak area right now:

I managed to beat the first guy 2:0 (this punch wasn't a point, check out that crooked pose!)

But lost my second round 0:2

The guy I lost to, lost his next round and got 3rd place.. I was just one well-placed kick from that! Oh well, better luck at the next NYTKL event, in two weeks.

on a more entertaining note

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:35:07 GMT

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.

that crazy NYPD cop and other people unfit to do their jobs

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:26:05 GMT

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 here

While 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.

you have gained a level!

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:35:11 GMT

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"

Not as cool as 0xdeadbeef, but...

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:32:08 GMT

cubbi@gummadoon ~ $ date +%s
1234567890
cubbi@gummadoon ~ $

(LOL on Freenode's ##1234567890 there are 1260+ people right now, celebrating)

Happy Darwin Day!

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:09:46 GMT

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.

terror and math

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:26:06 GMT

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?

New favorite figurine

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:55:43 GMT

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.

obligatory post about Obama's inauguration

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:32:02 GMT

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."