What do you get when you mix Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Ozzy Osbourne, & Daft Punk. This awesome mashup by Dan Mei and Marc Johnce (Marc’s WP.com blog):
Good stuff!
Interesting Science Points: 6/19/09
Water on Mars
Discovery Article | Reuters Article
Scientists have found evidence of what were formerly the beaches of a standing lake on Mars. The water at one time filled a 80-square-mile long canyon, and would’ve been up to 1500 foot deep. They’re saying it’s also the youngest body of water they’ve found (so far, I guess), though I’ve read articles that say it formed about 3.4 billion years ago, and that it dried up around the same time (the latter is from Discovery, which I’m more inclined to trust). Either way, that’s still 300-some-odd million years after they believe the planet’s “warm and wet” phase ended. It’s deltas (lakes can have deltas? I thought that was a river feature :/) are rich in sediment, which makes it a prime place to look for organic material/remnants. Some admit that this could be an anomaly, possibly caused by Tharsis Rise (in the equatorial area), and while it really is a cool discovery, I think I’d agree that’s more likely than everything else we’ve learned so far being off *shrugs* Of course, we won’t really be sure of anything until we can actually get there and make observations firsthand.
Cognitive Ornithology
(Photo by nature55 on flickr)
“Birds are exceptionally skilled at discriminating between visual images.”
The experiment involved the same human approaching and threatening the nest of a mockingbird in the university campus on four successive days. The mockingbirds raised alarm, rushed to attack her and rushed towards her each day, at increasingly greater distances from her. But when a different human came near the nest on the 5th day, the birds reacted as they did on the first day with the first intruder.
And they were quite comfortable with the hundreds of people walking across the campus quadrangle near the nest, as long as they were safely away.
These results suggest that the typical urban bird, the mockingbird, learns quickly to identify individual humans…
This is interesting to me for a couple different reasons. First, I wonder how someone decided they wanted to do a study like this. Anyone who’s lived in the same general area as mockingbirds for a decent period of time can tell you they’re incredibly territorial. I can’t tell you how many times I watched my dad get dive-bombed over the years on his way out to the mailbox (ha!). So how did they get from “mockers will attack anything that threatens them in their territory” to “mockers remember that annoying kid who was trying to screw with their nest, and will specifically attack him anytime he gets within a hundred feet”? It’s interesting, anyway. Second, Mockingbird is one of my totem animals, and I always find it interesting when studies like this come up that revolve around them. They really are smarter than people give them credit for, even if the boys can be frustrating as hell with their mid-night serenades.
Three Months
Listening to: Kelly Clarkson - Three Months
And I don’t know, this could break my heart or save me
Nothing’s real until you let go completely
So here I go with all my thoughts I’ve been saving
So here I go with all my fears weighing on me
Three months and I’m still sober
Picked all my weeds but kept the flowers
But I know its never really over
And I don’t know I could crash and burn but maybe
At the end of this road I might catch a glimpse of me
So I won’t worry about my timing I wanna’ get it right
No comparing, second-guessing, no, not this time
Three months and I’m still breathing
Been a long road since those hands I left my tears in
But I know it’s never really over, no
Wake… up
Three months and I’m still standing here
Three months and I’m getting better, yeah
Three months and I still… mmm, oh
Three months and its still hard enough
Three months of living here without you now
Three months and three months I, oh…
Three months and I’m still breathing
Three months and I’m still remembering
Three months and wake… up
Three months and I’m still sober
Picked all my weeds but kept the flowers
Before I forget or get sidetracked (for the umpteen millionth time -.-), my copy of Wind Tunnel Dreams by Shira Lipkin arrived on Monday. Shiny! I’ve started thumbing through it a bit. I think this is going to be one of those collections I open at random and read a story or two per sitting. I love books like this! Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn duology is another great collection. (The link goes to the second volume in the set. Apparently there’s not an Amazon-direct entry for the first one. :/)
Musical Muse: My Love
I’ve cheated a little (and on the first go-round :p), and gone with a song with lyrics that was already in my music library. I woke up with it in my head a couple days ago, and it spawned the idea for this (”My clown, let me love you/What’s that?/Back to the back of the rebound/Clown hang around…” has sounded like a story to me since I first heard this song). It’s unfortunate that I wasn’t able to finish it in the first sitting, since it is a pretty short story. I got this far and one too many distractions derailed that train with extreme prejudice >.< There is an ending (a couple actually), and it was originally never supposed to be as tragic/bittersweet-sounding as it does :/ But now my brain just keeps tripping up at what to do next, how to bridge the gap between points A and B. This has been an issue in the past on multiple projects. But it almost, almost sounds like a finished piece as-is, so rather than stress and beat myself up for not finishing it, I’ll go ahead and post it. I can always come back and finish it later if the mood strikes me. I did at least write something. *sighs*
—
Watching from the curtains behind the ring, she smiles. She’s seen his act a thousand times, and knows it as well as he does. She watches the faces in the audience: children sqealing with delight; surprised guffaws from the adults as he stumbles over to a large family and produces flowers from the air for the daughters.
And yet, as close as they are to him, they don’t see it. If his smile is crooked, it’s a trick of the makeup, the eyepatch a part of the costume. Clowns exist to make people happy, and so he does night after night. He laughs and prances around the ring, playing the fool for them. Occasionally a child will find him after the show, wide-eyed and shy, parents in tow, and want to give him a big hug. Even then, that close up, they don’t see the scars, and he smiles radiantly and reaps the joy he’s sown in the sown in the world.
After the night’s performance is over, and she’s cleaned up, she knocks on the door of his wagon. There’s no answer, but after a moment, she opens the door and steps inside, closing it quietly behind her. He’s sitting there at his makeup table, back to the door, shoulders slumped, unmoving, and she goes to him and wraps her arms around him. In the mirror, he’s bare-faced and disfigured, no more a clown with a crooked, beaming smile, but a broken man, hiding from the world. She doesn’t say anything, knowing it’s enough that she’s there. She doesn’t say she’s sorry or that everything will be okay. She never has, not in all the time they’ve known each other. She knows him well enough to know it’s not necessary, and loves him enough to let him lean against her in silence until the bleak mood exhausts itself for another night. She thinks–hopes he knows, but she bites her tongue on the words, afraid that he’ll think she pities him and push her away.
She smells faintly of vanilla and campfire smoke, he notices as the haze of self-pity starts to lift, and warm, her arms and her cheek against the back of his shoulder. Even after the years they’ve known each other — five, maybe six at this point — it still surprises him just a little every time he hears her knock at the door. He loves her for it, so he lets her see his face, and fears the day she’ll come to tell him she’s found a good man who’ll make her happy.
Post-Weekend Update: 6/15/09
Meant to post this yesterday :p Anyway, I had a pretty good weekend.
Friday: Hung out with Paul and Ryan, since Ryan’s woman was out doing her own thing, and he was feeling a little stir crazy at home. He picked up Arkham Asylum recently (Cthulu boardgame), and brought it along, so we worked our way through a game of that after dinner. Can you say “complex?” Yeah. But fun! The next time should be even more fun since we’ve picked up a good bit of the mechanics and junk.
Saturday: Ended up getting to bed kinda late Friday night, but got a nice wakeup on Saturday at a weekend-decent hour. Tooled around with Paul until it was time to head to Elements for a massage appointment made earlier in the week. Oh my gosh, hot stones ftw. When I went last month for my birthday, it was awesome. This time? Holy crap. We got the hot stones add-on — which, unfortunately, ended up being a good bit more expensive than I’d though it was going to be, but totally worth it — and it was amazing. I also preferred the masseuse I had this time to the previous one. They both did a fantastic job, but the one I had Saturday seemed less…impersonal? Detached..? When you’re dealing with other people’s bodies in a professional setting, as with massage, I’d assume it’d make sense to maintain a certain level of detachment so there’s no misinterpretation of any part of the process. Totally understandable. There was just a marked difference in the bedside manner of the two ladies. Anyway, but the hot stones were great, and confusion with the pricing aside, well worth the money. I’ll definitely be double-checking the rate next time though :/
Afterward Paul surprised me with lunch at the CNN Center, which I hadn’t been to before (got a chicken cheese wrap, and it was OMGgood). It’s kinda small, but D00D, there’s a Cartoon Network store! We stopped in and it didn’t take long to realize I wanted to buy like half of their tshirt inventory :p Also, the Turner store gave me an awesome idea for Con costumes this year. They have Merlotte’s (of True Blood fame) tshirts, the ones the waitresses wear. It’d be awesome to get a few of us girls together and dress as wait staff one night this year at Dragon*Con :D Heh, it’d probably be the most comfortable thing any of us wear all Con :p And if we feel like mixing it up, we could go as various critters from the series (vampire/shifter/fae/etc).
The rest of Saturday night and Sunday were pretty much lazy affairs, which was awesome since it’s been at least a few weeks since I’ve spent a weekend just doing nothing. No plans, no obligations to be anywhere (except the massage appt, but, really? I don’t think that should count), just sitting around watching tv and putzing around online. Unfortunately the laziness ran away with us, and we ended up staying up til 2am Sunday night/Monday morning to do some desperately-needed laundry. But somehow I didn’t feel like I was dragging at all at work the next day.
Matt, our graphic designer, is on vacation in Europe for the next two weeks (lucky bastard! where’s my dragon!), and I get to fill in for him on top of the stuff I normally have to do. Thankfully for the time being, we’re pretty dead. I’m just waiting for something to give, and dump tons of work in my lap, but I’m keeping my figures crossed that it won’t :p
P.S. I haven’t forgotten about the music-prompts. I’m writing, but it’s going slowly. My imagination-foo has become weak. It hasn’t been exercised this way in what feels like a very, very long time >.<
The Boys Are At It Again
An article via Julianna on Twitter: “Prude or Professional? by Courtney Remes”
This is disappointing. I’m no prude by a long shot. Hell, in other contexts, I would’ve been laughing. But really. Time and place, kids. A professional convention — unless maybe it’s a pro-BDSM convention — is not that place. Browsing through the comments, I think this echoes my thoughts on a lot of things beautifully:
Matt Gray :
If you have to resort to the sexual equivalent of fart jokes to get your audience’s attention, you should work harder on your content.
(On the positive side, Dave Schroeder, the producer of Flashbelt (which I’m not familiar with) has apologized, and been supportive of the people who’ve spoken up about the incident. Link
Changing tacts just a bit, this comment is not just applicable to the general attitude of the world’s boys’ clubs toward women. Advertising, movies, tv, music — and apparently, now I can add the occasional professional presentation to the list — frequently seem to think the attention of the viewing public can only be gotten by crude humor and idiocy. Even more sad is how often people prove them right. It’s frustrating what kind of junk becomes rabidly popular these days. Shows like Jackass, almost every Will Farrell movie (he’s done how many films?, and there has been one, count it ONE movie of his that I’ve seen that was intelligent as well as funny), dumb commercials (oh, Axe, what happened?). And the list just keeps growing.
It’s a form of laziness, in a way. It’s easy to play dumb, and laugh at stupid jokes; it’s all animal-brain. It takes work to think think intelligently. I can see the appeal of catering to the lowest common denomenator. People are smart, the mob is dumb. Dumb sells because it’s more accessible to everyone. I get it. But when you treat everyone like they’re dumb all the time…? Keep telling someone something enough, and they’ll eventually start to believe it. Or in this case, act it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy some senseless or silly fun every now and then, but when nearly everything is geared toward that lowest common denomenator, people’s animal brain becomes used to running rampant, while the thinking brain gets flabby and lazy. Because when you call to the inanity in society, intelligence is probably not going to be the one to answer.
You can observe it happening all around you, every day. Idiocracy, here we come.
Edit for a random side note: This is Tabard’s in! 100th entry :D It may be cheating a little, since I’ve backposted some stuff from LiveJournal and other media so they’d all be in the same place, but whatever :)