Scents

(written by Sarah:)

I submit, for your viewing pleasure, possibly the greatest product specification of recent memory:

Yes, that’s right, an Advanced Queering Engine.

Looks like, of course, the illicit love-child of a telephone booth and an iPod. Slick. Chic. Minimalist. Titanium. There are probably blue LEDs involved. As you walk by, faint strains of music slide up under your skin and into the soles of your feet; you don’t know what it is, but you walk just a little more musically after that. The AQE is the ultimate black box – we cannot fathom its inner workings, only observe.

Our test subject, let’s call him Steve, sports dirty fingernails, a five o’clock shadow, and the unmistakable lingerings of his lunchtime beer. Throwing informed consent to the four winds, our testing committee chucks him inside. The flawless one-way glass doors seamlessly click shut. A rhythmic hum builds from inside the AQE; the testing crew is observed to swing their hips and shoulders ever so slightly in time. The hum appears to have the resonant frequency of hair, which dances into place in a gel-less miracle hold.

With a sharp intake of breath from the observers, Steve emerges. At first there is no perceptible difference. But the longer we stare, the more subtle details fall into place. Steve’s wardrobe has not changed, but he wears it better. The lines are crisper and smoother, the creases fall just so. He exudes coordination. Whatever he wears is stylish by virtue of being worn by him. His hair, too, is mussed as always, but mussed with purpose, daring anyone to suggest the look is unintentional.

His bearing is straighter and his joints are looser; he walks gracefully, like a cat. He holds his hands out just slightly – not to flaunt, but enough that you may notice his fingernails are, in fact, dirt-free. The beer smell is still there, but it’s musky, peppery now. Steve is a new man.

*sigh* So hot now, and more unattainable than ever. The women of the testing committee wander off for pity and coffee.

Anna’s photos of New Year’s 2005 are beautiful. They show how good photography can still be done even under less than ideal circumstances (a cramped basement full of teenagers) with a decent camera, an external flash… and a brilliant eye for lighting and composition.

I normally don’t just quote other people verbatim, but… from David Chess:

One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”

And the student was enlightened.

certified public alligator was this idea i had of making a calculator out of a room full of alligators, wading pools, and fish, where the alligators would move around as part of a finite state machine which could do simple arithmetic. one could use this to do one’s taxes. and if you get them wrong and are audited…. alligators!

Many people, somewhere on their site, dump a winamp or iTunes generated listing,
presumably in order to dazzle the ladies with their unrivaled musical depth and
good taste.

This annoys the hell out of anyone searching for an mp3 of
that rare song, only to find that yes, someone has it, and no, there’s no actual
link to the song.

Instead of that, I present the distribution of the lengths of songs
in my library:

Of some geeky interest as well: a scatterplot of song length versus mp3 file size. Note how
the different encoding rates are clearly visible.

If you must know…