XinT

By anders pearson 01 May 2001

Q: what do you get when you mix together the following?

• one Z-80 microprocessor (state of the art… in 1976. 3.7MHz. 8 registers. 2K of RAM)
• about 20 bucks worth of misc. electronic parts
• 2 antennae
• a few hundred hours of time that really ought to be spent on more important things, but…
• 4 engineering students with just enough knowledge to be dangerous
• a love of obscure musical instruments
• and a unhealthy desire to produce lots of loud, fucked up noises that will annoy the hell out of anyone in a ten block radius.

guess I'll go eat worms

By jp 30 Apr 2001

went and sat in on Dr. Pfefferkorn’s parasite lecture this morning. oooooh boy. highlights included:

• A cyst of larval pork tapeworms that had somehow made it into this guy’s head, and encysted in his brain. the cyst was so huge that when they finally opened the skull a little bit, it exploded open. the cyst was about 2/3 the size of the brain, you can imagine all that crammed into the skull
  
• A bunch of encysted guy tissue that was digested with proteinases(the cysts are resistant) to leave ~30 large, spherical pearls, all teeming with worm larvae.
  
• The fact that the fish tape worms don’t exclude additional parasites from the gut, allowing for one individual to have over a kilometer of worms that came out of his pooper.

guard your identity

By anders pearson 29 Apr 2001

i always thought it was silly that most schools use students’ social security numbers as keys for all their databases. i know that at columbia at least, you have to give your SSN to register for or drop classes, pay your tuition, get financial aid, get a transcript, and just about everything else that you might want to do. it always bothered me. what disturbed me even more was that no one else ever seemed at all bothered by it. “what’s the big deal? it’s just a number.” is the unspoken logic.

well, here’s one reason you might want to think twice before handing over your SSN to the next person who asks for it.

what’s really bad though is how common that the SSN is used for identification. it was never intended for that. early versions of SSN cards explicitly stated on back that they were “not to be used for identification purposes.” the desire for a unique id for every person in the country is understandable from the standpoint of the organizations that need to track large numbers of users but there have got to be better ways. there is just no reason that SSN’s should be considered adequate for identification. they’re no longer safe; literally hundreds of organizations from the government to credit card companies to schools know any given person’s SSN. it’s relatively easy to find out someone’s SSN (dumpster diving, anyone?). yet it’s still treated like some kind of secret key.

also, from a privacy standpoint, unique identification numbers for citizens are a somewhat frightening concept. it creeps me out anyway.

fix

By anders pearson 29 Apr 2001

heather spotted and fixed a little bug in my markov code that was probably responsible for some of its tendency to get stuck in little loops. nice evidence that open-source is good for everyone involved. thanks heather.

(and, because i pay attention to my HTTP_REFERER’s, i know why she was going through markov’s internals with a fine-tooth comb. but i’ll let her keep it a secret until she’s ready to share. ;)

life without <table>'s

By anders pearson 29 Apr 2001

little redesign. this time, i have completely removed thraxil’s reliance on <table> tags for layout. it’s all CSS now. still a little buggy since i don’t have IE around to test with, but that should all be cleaned up pretty soon.

literacy

By anders pearson 27 Apr 2001

i’m almost entirely done with my undergraduate education now. pretty much all i have left is one homework assignment, one term paper, and one final. for the last month or so i haven’t really had time to catch my breath with all the projects i was working on for my classes. a few weeks ago i was suffering from a particularly bad bout of insomnia and found myself up really late too tired to really do any work but knowing that i wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for a few more hours. about then, i realized that i had almost no fiction at all on my bookshelf here at school. i had about two novels, neither of which i felt like reading for the 20th time or so right at the moment, amongst 30 or so computer, math, and electronics textbooks (which aren’t terribly appealing bedtime reading either).

so i went online and ordered a bunch of paperbacks. i grabbed a couple collections of HP Lovecraft stories (tuck had recently reminded me how intricate and immersive his writing is), willian s. burroughs’ Junky (because i hadn’t read it yet), Blood Sugar by nicole blackman (because she rocks), and the Pit Dragon trilogy (Dragon’s Blood, Heart’s Blood, and A Sending of Dragons) by jane yolen.

the pit dragon trilogy is worth an extra mention. they’re children’s books. or “young adult” level i guess would be more accurate. i read them for the first time when i was in 4th grade or so and absolutely loved them. re-reading them now, i’m happy to see that they really are just good books.

over the course of my book-buying binge, i realized how infrequently i’d been able to actually read for pleasure over the last few years. when you’re in school and having to read hundreds of pages of dense engineering textbooks every week, the last thing you want to do with your spare time is read more. so now i’m really looking forward to my soon to be “graduated” state. the first thing i’m going to do is start reading everything that i missed out on in the last few years.

synchronicity

By anders pearson 25 Apr 2001

this morning i was awoken from a dream about riding on top of a train through germany by mimi calling from berlin. neat how that works.

stupidity is a crime

By jp 23 Apr 2001

this pisses me off, a great deal.

okay, given that maybe there’s some moral barrier some people may lack, given that everyone wants insta-fix scapegoats for the modern age, given that parents who are too entirely detached and incabable to raise children are still allowed to breed, there’s still such a piss-poor reasoning for tossing the blame around like this.

this angers me most, because as someone who has had plenty of exposure to the agent of corruption at hand and many people who are in theory corrupted by the same great satan, neither I nor they resemble the irrational violent phenotype in any way. I’ll pick on myself:

I’ve never been in a fight, though I love to play the most hideously grotesque fighting sims. Matter of fact, I’ve actively ducked my way out of several fights and never looked back without giving it second thought. I play some seriously tweaked shoot-em-up games, and have never even had the urge to hunt. Wasting a thousand million pawns of some evil empire is all in a quarter’s play, but I don’t think I’d even want to nail a teeney weeney bunny wabbit. It’s just not appealing.

I just don’t understand how parents who are so starved for an explanation of why can reasonably launch such a large scale effort to tackle something they a) know shit about and b) have no rationale for proving it’s the catalyst.

why do people honestly believe that humans are so weak in spirit to take any image or idea presented to them and follow it as if it were their destiny? it’s not that simple. if someone is so tweaked that they’ll crack and use mimicry so easily, there was plenty more going on before. you want a scapegoat, go after their parents. people are only open to suggestion if they’ve got no moral barriers to begin with — those are usually a product of upbringing, which defines their presence, integrity and limits.

it’s just what it sounds like people, entertainment. does this mean I can sue Electronic Arts if little Billy grows up to be a hockey player rather than the academic I always wanted him to be? It’s the same thing as what these folks are saying, and it’s an equal load of bunk.

You want something that makes people do evil things, go after the Church or any organized religion. That’s brainwashing. You want a way to peddle away some hours between classes or unwind for a bit in the evening, try Sega. That’s recreation. You want to blame video games for causing people to snap, try blaming yourself. If people really can’t distinguish between reality and a simulated reality, than there’s something way upstream that we need to be tackling.

And you know behind it all these fucks just want to get rich from the loss of their children. Ah Amurdermerica.

heat sinks

By anders pearson 19 Apr 2001

ok, here’s my idea for a product that will surely make me millions: personal heat sinks. the ultimate warm weather accessory. functionality is identical to heatsinks used in computers but applied to people. you just get some chunks of aluminum that are flat on one side with various fins sticking out on the other and sew them into garments so that the flat sides are pressed against skin with as much contact as possible. this maximizes surface area, allowing for as much heat as possible to be transferred away from the body.

venture capital, anyone?

want

By anders pearson 17 Apr 2001

heather and i were chatting the other night and she kept asking me what i was looking for, what i wanted. i couldn’t really come up with a satisfactory answer at the time. the question’s been rolling around in my head for the last few days this is the best answer i can come up with for now.