entirely safe and fun

Jenn knit the squat, repulsive idol, no doubt inspired by “an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.” She survived to take the photo, sanity just barely intact. Now she wants to be rid of it - you can help!

What thing is this, pausing before a cyclopean door?

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
- H P Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu

Available now on Etsy, courtesy of our friend Jenn — an awesome knit finger-idol of Cthulhu, sure to provide hours of sanity-ripping fun! Buy it and make regular sacrifices, and you might even be eaten last!

Clean babies are agreeable, but how efficient are they?

Just a few new pictures are up on Flickr, available here.

Last night, Punam and I bathed Dante; it took about half an hour. I couldn’t help but think that my surface area must be an order of magnitude greater than his (I outweigh him about 25:1), and it only takes me about seven or eight minutes to shower. Data, clearly, needed to be collected!

I settled on a simplified model of the body that would be a fairly close estimate and would only require seven measurements: Consider the torso and each limb as a cylinder, with length measured in the obvious way and circumference measured around the middle part (above the knee, below the elbow, at the bottom of the ribcage), then fit a sphere around the head (circumference measured as if for a hat). Here’s what I got, for Dante and for myself, in cm:

Multiplying each length by its corresponding circumference gives us the surface area of the cylindrical components. The head’s SA is just c²/π. Adding up the results, I estimate Dante’s surface at 6435cm² and mine at 37719cm² — just about six times greater. Dante (3.2kg) has a SA:mass ratio of 2011cm²/kg compared to 460 in my case, which underlines the commonplace that babies have to work a lot harder than adults to thermoregulate (roughly four times harder). But more importantly for our purposes, we learn that Dante’s totally factitious Bathing Efficiency Coefficient is 6435 cm²/30 min = 3.57cm²/sec against my 78.6cm²/sec, so we can conclude that bathing him is quite inefficient.

That said… we’re not going to skimp on it or anything. Clean babies are very nice to have around.

Edit: Forgot that each kind of limb comes in pairs. Doubled their contributions, updated numbers, point still intact.

Or: i catched u a mummy mouse but i mummy eated it

We made a trip down to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose this weekend. They’ve got a fine and accessible presentation there of some neat artifacts, with a helpful yet unintrusive curatorial narrative. In particular, the exhibit of non-tomb-related items is excellent, counteracting the usual perception created in Egyptian collections that the ancient Egyptians had nothing else to do but prepare for death (a perfect real-world example of sample bias). Adding to the allure, they have several remarkably pretty formal gardens on the grounds. Be aware that you’ll have to deal with a lot of stairs if you go, so the museum isn’t wheelchair-accessible.

All of that being said, this is what I have to offer you. It is a sad commentary on the memetic power of the internets that after everything that we saw and learned, and with all the things I could have photographed thanks to the Museum’s enlightened policy, the one thing I couldn’t resist sharing was a lolcatterized feline mummy, made from a noisy phonecam picture.

When I came to the Valley, I didn’t expect to get much use out of my impractical (but, I hope, tasteful!) philosophy education. But in fact, my cow orkers have a delightfully high density of interest in the metaphysics of ethics. Behold my whiteboard:

What Kant didn’t say is that a universal moral rule should be at least as tasty and nutritious as pure evil.
Also, for the record, I misspelled “flocculates” in my contribution.

Koan

The control which can be frobbed is not the true control. / Photo: Ian Easton

Earlier this evening, Punam and I used the self-checkout station at the grocery store. At first, everything proceeded normally - I entered my club card number, scanned the OJ and veggies, indicated that we were done, and chose to pay by card. The familiar prompt appeared on the touchscreen: “Please use the PIN pad to complete your transaction.” I looked down at the display of the PIN pad, which helpfully was telling me to “USE TOUCHSCREEN TO COMPLETE TRANSACTION.” The completion of the transaction did not inhere in the PIN pad or the touchscreen, but in the resignation of the possibility of completion.

At that moment, we achieved enlightenment.

Then the Clerk responsible for overseeing the self-checkouts plokta’d (pressed lots of keys to abort) the PIN pad to induce an error state in the system, from which it recovered normally and re-prompted me to choose a method of payment.

Colin’s Commentary

Truly, Clerk has the Buddha-nature. But does the PIN pad? The touchscreen? To answer is to demonstrate your own lack!

Neither rain nor rock becomes a canyon.
Neither PIN pad nor touchscreen
offers direction toward enlightenment.
The master unlocks any door with every key, all at once.

More koans here.

I decided I’d take a shot at lolcattery, Creative Commons style. Thanks to viciousv for the excellent by-sa source material.

Puppy thinks that flame war time is the best naptime.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Law school was out of ctrl, but I just spaced out and found myself board shiftless.

Via the vital blog Anonymous Lawyer comes this gem of a story. Adrian Zachariasewycz, a law student at the University of Michigan Law School has brought suit against the school (among other things), alleging in his complaint that:

18. Upon information and belief, the system of course examination and grading at the Law School in certain exams disadvantaged students that could not type at a sufficient speed to produce the volume of text required to produce competitive examination responses.

In other words, he’s suing the law school for discriminating against him as a slow typist. I’ve got no sympathy for any party to the case; law schools’ feathers fletch the arrows that are shot at them. Train enough litigators and you’re bound to get sued. But the law school is the least unsympathetic party, like Mel Gibson’s character Potter in Payback.

I’ve prepared a little rubric about what’s wrong with this picture…

1. Law school grades are proportional to the amount of text produced. This certainly explains the cost of litigation — we’re apparently paying by the word!
2. Somehow, this guy, who is supposed to be training as a lawyer, missed the fact that “slow typists” are not a protected class. Volunteer for the Army, or convert to Mithraism, and try again, buddy.
3. He is also proceeding pro se, meaning, as the old saw has it, that he has a fool for a client. Also, it means that he couldn’t convince a lawyer not related to him that his case has a lick of merit (assuming that Maria Zachariasewycz, co-complainant, is a lawyer).
4. If this guy wins his lawsuit, the precedent will be set such that every Computer Science graduate with a GPA less than 4.0 is in for a payday. No lie, I wore an inch off each finger in college.

Anonymous Lawyer has this to say: “I don’t think this kid who’s suing his law school is going to have much luck finding a job. Not even so much because of the lawsuit, but because he’s admitting he’s a lousy typist. What else is a first year associate good for anyway?”

In the Internet’s fastest-working meme labs — places like 4chan, fark, Something Awful, YTMND, etc — a phenomenon has grown up of adding captions to (typically) animal pictures, often featuring Vazquez-esque tortured syntax and spelling for added humor value (”for the lolz,” one might say). The archetypal image of this type is certainly the O RLY? owl.

But the greatest consumer of captioned animal images appears to be Caturday — at least, this is what they tell me, as I have no plan of going anywhere near the place — which calls for captioned cat images, and so I believe it is fair to adopt the world “lolcat” to describe the class. It is the tag that the new-as-of-this-year blog I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? has come to apply, I think most fittingly. What a great word! It is officially my Favorite New Word of 2007 So Far.

Also, kitten.

For now, he rests — but soon the stars will again be right, and the groundhog will arise from his long slumber!

Groundhog Day! That quaintest of traditions! Thousands gathered in the tiny town of Punxsutawney, PA (site may be slashdotted), for dawn rodent-watching and early-morning Straub-drinking, pounding longnecks as they greet their own long shadows in the chill pink light! No holiday is more Homeric than this, when the elements themselves gather in sympathy for a great groundhog and order themselves at his disposal.

That such a holiday is most famously observed in Pennsyltuckey — that frequently lovely but perpetually benighted region east of Pittsburgh and west of Philadephia — has long confused me, since no one there actually likes groundhogs; locals’ animus against burrowing rodents increases in proportion to their economic dependence on hooved livestock. A neighbor of mine in Lancaster once offered the pithy observation that “A spade is a tool for digging holes. A small-bore rifle is a tool for removing groundhogs.”

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Recently, some of my colleagues (not me, and I’m not entirely sure who) wallpapered the cube of one of my vacationing cow-orkers with sticky notes. The only camera I had handy to document the result was the one built into my cell phone, which does not quite have the kind of optics that accommodate wide-angle shots. I figured I’d just moasic the results together. Then, I remembered that I was taking all of the shots from different spots, but I seemed to recall a “Perspective” tool in the GIMP that I could maybe use to correct for that, and map the cube onto a two-dimensional window using some kind of projection.

It all went horribly wrong, but the nightmarish distortion of perspective was somehow compelling in a Bosch-via-surrealism way.

I also used a freely-available packaged panorama stitcher, hugin, which gave less jarring (thanks to better color blending) but no less disorienting a result:

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