another orca dream, with a talking hat

I sent this to a friend:

Last night I dreamed that I was sitting in my upstairs office working and you kept sending me emails but when I opened them I couldn't read them. It was like trying to read a piece of paper under water. And then I heard you say, apparently through my laptop somehow, "that's because I'm sending you emails from my boat."

Then somehow I was transported to your boat, which was somewhere in the arctic. There were huge icebergs everywhere and it was freezing. I saw you sitting in the pilot house looking at some maps. You were wearing a thick red flannel shirt and a black wool cap. You didn't look at me so I looked out over the stern of the boat and saw a bunch of orcas jumping out of the water right next to the boat. It was really cool.

I turned around to tell you about the orcas but you weren't in the pilot house. So I looked around the inside of the boat for you but you were gone. Then I thought to myself "Hm, I'm in the middle of the arctic surrounded by ice on a boat that I don't know anything about." So I went back up to the stern and your hat was laying on the deck. It said to me "I think this is probably just a test."

Then I woke up.

The hat had a voice like Kermit the frog.

My friend responded:

I doubt that was me...none of my hats sound like Kermit.

what's with all the orcas?

I keep having dreams about great whites and orcas (mortal enemies, those two).

Last night I dreamed that I was on a fishing boat in a hurricane, and we were supposed to keep all the ports shut, but I was outside, starboard, and the boat dipped into the water. I saw a great white looking up at me (I was standing in water up to my knees) so I reached out and pet the great white on the head. Then an orca jumped over the boat and I was like "that was so cool!" So the great white bit my hand (I was wearing a mitten, actually) and wouldn't let go because it was jealous I liked the orca better. The captain ran outside and was like "what the fuck are you doing out here?!? You'll drown in those seas if you go overboard!"

(which is true, I've been outside on a boat in a hurricane)

The great white let go of my hand and waved his pectoral fin as if beckoning someone behind him. Suddenly about 10 huge mantas showed up next to the great white, who said, "Meet my friends, we're cooler than the orca!"

I was like "yeah, yawn" because I wanted the orca to come back. Then the captain of the boat yanked me inside the galley and nailed plywood over the windows.

After the captain left I ripped the plywood off one of the windows with my fingers so I could see what was going on outside. The great white and the orca kept jumping over the bow. I couldn't decide which one I liked best.

Then I woke up.

push the button? don't push the button?

Well, I used to think Lenovo laptops sucked badly. They do. But my HP laptop (work assigned) sucks worse. On Thursday it died. When I hit the power button I get this:

Mother. Fucker.

Usually when a hard drive is about to step on a rainbow it acts weird or gives you a warning. Not in this case.

I've been running all the BIOS tests. Nothing of interest coming out of them. I did a web search on the error message, then checked HP's web site. I find it ironic that you can find a prostitute shitting on a german man's face on the internet but not the solution to my boot up problem. Fuck you internet. And I can't create a recovery disk because apparently you can only do that once and some fuckwit in IT must have done it already for my laptop. And when I take my laptop in on Tuesday (yes, they can't fix it until Tuesday, not exactly speedy service) they'll probably just wipe the hard drive and re-image it.

So now I'm debating doing a factory reset to see what happens. Because of course I had a lot of files on my hard drive that weren't backed up and if I lose them I am SCREWED. For the record, my hard drive is encrypted. To back up my drive I have to have an external encrypted hard drive.

That means the backup goes R   E    A     L       S         L          O          W.

Like the whole weekend to back up My Documents.

Running the diagnostics again. Then I think I'm going to press the reset button. Like, it's not going to get worse. Is it?

Should I press the button?

not everyone takes the universe as seriously as I do

Me (to my friend Klaus):

I have to get back to my dark energy class. I am getting so far behind. I'm only up to universe primordial soup and the next lecture is black holes.

Klaus:

The beginning of the universe: I think the mice have all the answers. I don't like rodents so I might never find out what the real story as Douglas Adams is dead. Otherwise I'd call him. My second theory is that everything started with a can of coke that exploded and that Coca Cola will actually reveal that in an super bowl ad.

...and some cooking advice from mom

I sent my mom an email about the chili I made, as well as a picture.

My mom wrote:
All I could think of when I read your Blog was, how in the world you are going to eat all that.  It filled your biggest pot, didn't it?  Are you going to freeze it in smaller portions? 

Er, good point. 

Anyone hungry for some chili? I have, let's see, 11 more servings.

127 hours and other cutting limbs off projects

My friend Carol came over tonight with chinese food (Uptown Wok - highly recommend it!) and we watched 127 hours. I read the book because I e-met Aron through Paradox Sports (I was mentoring a woman who had lost her arm and wanted to try ice climbing) but had never had the desire to watch the movie. But decided to give it a go and I'm glad. It was REALLY good (except the part showing him driving out of the city at the beginning - guess they did that to show how isolated canyonlands is but it definitely didn't look like Colorado). I should note we were supposed to watch it at Carol's house on Sunday (she got a new DVD player) but I couldn't get the DVD player to work with the TV (she had the wrong cable).

Anyway, while we were watching the movie my friend Blanch emailed me. I emailed him back that we were watching 127 hours.

Blanch:

Hey, I'm mentioned in Aron Ralston's book (127 Hours)*. He was volunteering at the Banff Film Fest one year and I gave him some advice on what to climb. They figure that he used the gift -fake- Leatherman from the Fest to cut off his arm.



*He's quoted at the beginning of Chapter 15, which is about Aron cutting his arm off. The quote is "It was like having sex with death." (about Blanch's team's attempt to climb the 15,000 ft Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat)

In the movie they said his mom gave it to him as a stocking stuffer. But I like Blanch's story better.

Speaking of cutting things off, Carol is going to show me how to take apart a chicken and then make chicken stock. She was like "why do you want to make chicken stock?" and I was like "hm, no reason in particular". All part of learning to cook. BTW, I am NOT touching a raw chicken. It's going to be a cooked chicken. I think I'll get two in case I fuck up the first one (which I can guarantee I will). She told me to get some shears, and at first I had this image of a razor thing (like shearing sheep) and started to feel ill that I was going to have to "shear" something off the chicken. It turns out shears are scissors for cutting up shit like chicken.

stand back bitches, I am learning to cook!

I've been downloading recipes for a few weeks so today thought "you should maybe cook one of them since you're destroying the planet printing them out".

I found 4 recipes to make this week: chickpea soup with roasted garlic, some quinoa snacks I was advised not to make because quinoa is disgusting, quinoa pancakes (see previous item), and flank steak chili that boosts immunity because of the spices and shit in it.

I went to safeway and found everything all by myself. I also set a record because I went down 7 aisles (I usually only go down the aisle that has coke, and that's only if they don't have a coke display set up when you first walk into safeway, which is most of the time).

When I was checking out I went to Ms. Catherine because I like her the best. She took one look at my groceries and said "baby girl, what are you up to?" The first time I met Ms. Catherine she said "oh, are you having a party baby girl?" and I was like "um, no, those are my usual groceries".

most impressive grocery list EVER - btw, skipped the vegetable oil and used olive oil - vegetable oil just sounded like an oxymoron - what vegetable has oil in it????

I explained to Ms. Catherine that I'm learning to cook, mentioning specifically quinoa, and after she stopped laughing she said she thought I would do okay, but then sent the girl who was bagging my groceries to get me a box of chips ahoy (they were on huge sale). She said "if your dinner doesn't turn out Ms. Catherine gives you permission to have cookies for dinner". She's better than the pope.

So as part of the recipe I had to "pan sear" a flank steak. I had no idea what that meant. I looked it up online and it turns out the directions were perfect. Then I was heating my cast iron skillet and realized I had no idea how to tell when it was hot enough to do some searing. I called my mom (she helped with that part, just to be honest that I didn't totally do the recipe by myself - also, she gave me a totally cool tip: grate up a lemon and freeze it, then added it to shit you cooked after you cook it because it tastes good - also she translated quarts to ounces for me because I couldn't leave my chili by itself to go look that up on the internet).

I had to cut up the flank steak into little pieces. That was kind of gross.

it looks like I killed someone and then chopped them up on my cutting board - GROSS!

Then at some point I had to add a bunch of liquid stuff, beef stock, tomato sauce, blah blah. I still had two cans of stuff left and was like "FUCK!" because the pot I was cooking in was too small. I managed to transfer it to a bigger pot but then accidentally ran one of my pot holders down the garbage disposal (lesson learned about cleaning as I cook).

too fucking small, and pot holder accidentally fell into the other sink which is how it ended up in the garbage disposal

I started getting a little cocky after tasting my chili, and realizing it was actually edible, so I added some other stuff (sriracha sauce, green tabasco sauce, an entire can of diced green chilies, extra garlic) and it tasted even better. To me, at least. Of course it's simmering now. Could go downhill any moment because I always forget to check on it and make sure it isn't burning and shit.

Spices! Sriracha sauce! Wine! It's almost like I know what I'm doing!

Tomorrow I make the quinoa snacks and pancakes. Wednesday I make the chickpea soup.

Then, on to CHOPPED!

I'm KIDDING, of course.

BTW, got a viscosity injection in my knee (they gave me three times the normal dose because I'm special) and am not really supposed to be standing around cooking and stuff. But my knee feels fine. And I wanted to give a huge shout out to Dr. Koenig at Kaiser. Best. Knee. Doctor. Ever. She's going to get my zombie knee back in line so I don't have to have another surgery. And she's going to get me a TENS for free. If it reduces the pain even by a small percentage I will be VERY happy. And maybe bring her quinoa snacks.

Kidding again.

it's all fun and games until the car gets totaled

A friend of mine came into Denver last night so we could have dinner. I had walked to the restaurant but he insisted on giving me a ride since it was colder than fuck when we left.

Also, he has always been under the impression I live in a bad neighborhood so he didn't want me to walk home in the dark. I was like "my neighborhood is TOTALLY safe." So he dropped me at my front step and stayed to make sure I got into my house. As I was opening my door there was a huge CRASH noise. He was like "what the FUCK was that??????"

The crash was a car accident. A big insane guy rear ended some woman almost right in front of my house and then got out of his car and started yelling at her, my friend and I, and another neighbor who came out to see what happened. Someone called the cops (my bb was buried in my backpack). Then the guy got back into his car and drove away from the scene and it was like something out of a movie. First he pushed the car he hit out of the way with his huge car and then he drove over some sidewalks and shit, fishtailing down the street. Awesome cop car chase ensued because there was a police car with its lights off less than 50 feet from the scene. The cop did a u-turn, ran over someone's lawn, and then drove the wrong way down the street after the guy.

My friend was like "I think I'll leave now". He seemed slightly traumatized.

we hate you, will you please come back?

After all the tumult with my last employer I was shocked to receive an email inviting me to attend a technical conference that I used to present at (almost) every year. They also offered to pay my way.

For real?????

Yeah.

They better put me in a suite. With a free bottle of wine.

does an explosion count as a "facility mishap"?

I'm obviously not going to win any physics awards today. My excuse - I'm taking dayquil.

I was just washing my tea cup thing. I filled it with soap and water, put the lid on, and shook it pretty rigorously (my tea bag exploded and the inside of the cup was covered with tea leaves).

Weapon or innocent tea cup? Weapon

When I opened the top drinking thing to pour the water and soap out the contents of the cup exploded. Like shaking a coke can and then opening it. I will note the top of the cup DOES have a vent hole so I didn't expect it to explode.

This is after I cleaned most of the explosion up. I opened the DECAF cabinet and more soap came out.

And, I know this sounds made up but it's true, I just happened to be looking at this when the explosion happened:

This sign got doused which is why it's wrinkled.

Anyway, if you happen to have a friend you like to play jokes on, and a cup like the one pictured above (it doesn't have to be pink)...go for it. I'd suggest telling them it's a fresh brewed cup of what ever they like to drink. Make sure you are standing at least 5 feet away before they open it.

This, btw, is not my first explosion at work. There was my cake stealer explosion and my hot dog explosion. Once my dad's office building exploded while he was driving to pick me up at the airport.

And here is a very short history on explosives that I wrote to prove to a friend that a video he sent of guys surfing in a river was fake and not a result of preset charges in aforementioned river.

my mom has a pet owl

My dad said the owl is really big.

Pretty cool! I love owls!

Close up. I bet he can eat a lot of rodents. Hopefully some snakes too.

thanks for fucking up my door bitches

People who have never hung out with me in real life probably think every thing I write on here is bullshit. Everyone else knows it's not.

I just got home from work, am exhausted, was eating a clif bar for dinner, when suddenly it sounded like a SWAT team was trying to bash in my door. As I got up to see what the fuck was going on the handle on my door fell off.

for fucking real

I put the handle back on (more or less) and opened the door. There was an asian guy, his wife, and his 4 noisy fucking kids (who are currently running up and down the hall screaming - good job parents - allow me to give you the asshole of the month award). They had mistaken my room, 241, for their room, 261 (thought asians were supposed to be good at math?). Since the guy was banging and yanking on the other side of the door handle it caused my side to fall off (my guess anyway).

I should mention here that I have a do not disturb sign on my door and I'm listening to ministry, which I'm pretty sure people can hear while standing at my door (I got a room with no guests on either side of me - advantage of having status in a not too crowded hotel).

Twenty years living in hotel but there's always something new happening.

I'm not the only one who dislikes babies on planes

Today some fucktard sat in the bulk head, middle seat, with her child in arms infant.

Only 60 people had boarded the plane. The back of the plane was wide open. Annoying.

Please. Listen. Babies go in the back so we in the front don't have to listen to them screaming and crying for the entire flight (as aforementioned infant did). It's not that bad if you encounter a screaming baby on a plane every few months. But I travel twice every week. And I don't have kids. So it sucks to spend 5 hours every week on a plane (it's guaranteed they'll be screaming in the airport too so maybe that should be 9 hours) listening to someone's screaming child (or, like tonight, 4 screaming kids, two of whom were old enough to not be screaming and crying).

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way. I was emailing with my friend Klaus about the screaming infant:

Klaus:

My luck with kids on planes is legendary. I prepared a letter on one of my flights to Europe and handed it to the flight attendants. I couldn’t resist. 

 
Luckily I didn't end up in zip-ties for being a high maintenance-bitch. Of course this is an incomplete list and I forgot smacking on that list and guess what happened on that flight? ;)

the particle zoo! (since it's too cold to go to the Denver zoo)

I'm now two days behind in my dark energy class...

An interesting thing about quarks. They have two parts to them (a positive quark and a negative quark). But even though they have two parts a quark can't exist without both parts, which is why it's considered the smallest particle (even though it can still be divided into two parts). Kind of like siamese twins, or a worm that gets cut in half and forms two new worms. If you try to separate the positive quark from the negative quark they re-bond. One part always has a positive charge and is heavy, the other part is always a negative charge, and light.

Did you know there's such a thing as a charm quark? It's a positive quark, and the third heaviest (mass wise) quark. You can buy a stuffed charm quark doll here if you're a plushie who has a fetish for sub-atomic particles. The charm quark always hangs out with a strange quark. The strange quark is the third lightest quark. They are just two of 61 elementary particles that make up what's called the particle zoo (free admission on wikipedia!).

Charm quarks were discovered in 1969. The November Revolution is not the typical revolution where mobs burn buildings and loot stores and put in place their own government which always sucks worse than the old government. Two different physicists discovered the charm quark at the same time and announced their findings jointly on November 11, 1974 (i.e. the November revolution).

As I was trying to memorize all these quarks I started thinking "who really gives a fuck?" So I tried to find out what the practical usage is of knowing something is a charm quark. I found a lot of stuff like this:

What the fuck does THAT mean????

It turns out there is a practical application for classifying quarks by their mass. It's how particle physicists figure out the decay of a particle.  It also explains how particles can combine. And helps astronomers calculate the weight of things in the universe, like planets. Why would you give a shit in the real world? Because maybe you want to turn lead into gold. Or create an even more destructive nuclear weapon, if you're an asshole.

I might be procrastinating memorizing quarks. But really, I thought you should know about them.

trust me, jesus would laugh

Today I talked a friend into going to the aquarium with me, though it took some convincing.

Our texts:

Friend: we are going to be the only ones there without strollers.
Me: you mean you aren't going to bring a monkey in a stroller? dressed in an elvis costume? the monkey should be wearing big sunglasses.
Friend: Aw, I was going to surprise you with that! now I can't go.
Me: you could always dress up like the pope. that would surprise me.
Friend: the pope and I have a non-compete clause. should I come dressed as jesus?
Me: I have a restraining order against jesus.

parking garage...

Maybe this dream was partially inspired by a strange attractor analogy involving two parking garages...

Last night I dreamed I was trapped in a parking garage with 3 guys in their 20s who didn't have faces. We were on an underground floor and couldn't find a way to the outside. I noticed an opening to the floor above and started climbing up the opening by stemming up the walls. Then I started to fall but could reach the above floor. But the floor was made of bricks that kept crumbling and breaking off. Finally I managed to work my legs up enough that I could grab a concrete pillar and pull myself out.

The boys were afraid to climb up so I said I would get help. I walked to the edge of a ramp and suddenly a black toyota camry came crashing off the above floor. It smashed hood first into the ground. Glass and metal was flying everywhere and I was getting hit with it.

Some other guy who also had no face but who was older than me grabbed me and pulled me behind the concrete pillar. I said that there were 3 guys trapped on the lower floor. The guy said he would help them but just then another car crashed onto the floor and a huge fire started. There was so much smoke I couldn't see anything.

I asked the guy "which way to the outside????" and he said "there is no way out, we're going to die".

Then I woke up.

Funny that today Yahoo had a story about the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was supposedly given mathematical functions in his sleep. The functions were proven to be accurate. We were just talking about him in my chaos class.

Brain, if you're listening, maybe you could be more helpful re: dreams.

just because it has a formula on it doesn't mean it's a geek t-shirt

I've just started a new course called "Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The dark side of the universe", taught by Dr. Sean Carroll. He's a cosmologist. And he talks really fast.

Interesting side note: cosmologists weren't allowed to win the Nobel Prize until 1973.

Anyway, I didn't entirely understand this completely until I started the class, but gravity is not actually a force. That's because gravity behaves in a universal way through out space (where as forces on earth may not apply in space). Einstein's general relativity theory says that gravity is a component of spacetime, adding a curvature to spacetime.

Spacetime is the point of Einstein's special relativity theory, which is that space and time can't be separated and need to be considered together. The conclusion is that time is no longer absolute (if you've ever had a flight delayed you know what that means - time can go by excruciatingly slow). Anyway, since time and space are no longer absolute Einstein had to figure out a fixed speed limit for the universe. That's why nothing can go faster than the speed of light (in theory).

The curvature in space means that objects can be detected because they curve spacetime via gravity. Picture a flat handkerchief suspended by its four corners. If you put a tennis ball on the handkerchief it will bend around the ball. And if the ball were invisible you'd still know there was something in the handkerchief because you can see a dent where that invisible object is sitting.

Anyway, that's how they know about dark matter even though no one can "see" it. Yet.

The whole point of this post is that people walk around with shirts that say "E = mc2" and people think they're geeks. Well, if they really WERE geeks they would wear a shirt that says:

if you're wondering what happened to the internet, it was me

Perhaps I shouldn't discuss the Lyapunov exponent because the internet can't handle it.

Think it's time to get a new router...

my hero - Susan Oguya

Just read this very inspiring article about geek girls starting a technology club in Kenya. They call it Akirachick.

Sadly, there aren't that many women in technology. Which is a mystery to me because we're a lot better than men.

(no offense - our problem solving skills are just better suited to computers, mostly because they require logic and rational thinking - okay, that sounds mean towards men, but when was the last time you saw a woman lighting her farts on fire? - I just saw a man do that a month ago, and then film it with his iPhone to share on facebook)

I think Susan Oguya is the shit because she created a software program to decrease corruption in Kenyan farming even though she was discouraged from doing so because apparently some shit for brains people think women are incapable of coding.

And some people think being a geek is weird. Exempli gratia, an email exchange I had yesterday with a friend who competed in the Ice Breaker earlier this month (ice breaker wall explains the log reference). I was watching the last of my chaos classes and the professor, Dr. Strogatz was talking about how the heart works using chaos. Of course I had to share the information with someone:

Me:

How weird is this?????

Dr. Strogatz is talking about the Lyapunov exponent. It measures the butterfly effect in people's brains (if you remember the picture I sent you of the strange attractor - looked like a butterfly). Anyway, it turns out we all have chaotic brains and nerve impulses are ALWAYS on the strange attractor EXCEPT in the brains of people with epilepsy. Crazy! Less chaos in the brain leads to seizures!

Gross. He just showed some dude with electrodes sewn into his scalp so they can see which parts of that dude's brain cause the seizures. Apparently they can do some kind of surgery to fix the epilepsy.

Something else cool! When your heart beats not all the muscle tissue is beating, only parts. Makes sense, otherwise that would be a crazy muscle since it can't ever rest (until death anyway).
 
Heart arrhythmia is caused when part of the heart who are supposed to be resting keep beating. I have heart arrhythmia from when I got shocked back to life during my knee surgery. Apparently that's a draw back of being resuscitated.

Was eating a sandwich but he showed a rabbit heart and a dog heart in a chaos experiment to fix arrhythmia and now I'm not that hungry. Gross.

Friend:

I'm glad you're as weird as you are. Other people are eating chicken and drinking wine because it's Christmas Eve, you're contemplating chaos attractor schnazzle with respect to when you got shocked back to life. Solid. Drinking wine and eating chicken here. Keep it weird!

Me:

You dry humped a log hanging by a chain from a boom, but I'M the weird one?

Those fucking paddles burn the heart. That's how they get the heart beating again. My heart has literally been burned. 

There's a Leonard Cohen song or alka seltzer joke in there somewhere but I'm too busy being weird to figure that out.

Enjoy chicken. They roll around in their shit and peck each other's eyes out. Yum.

Friend:

Proper response.

Anyway, the important take away is that it's okay to be female and a geek. Own it.

Yeah, there are lots of girls out there. Some just aren't worth talking to.

My brother's ex-girlfriend got back in touch with him this week. Guess it's obvious why they broke up:

My Brother:
[A bunch of blah blah about working on the Mars rover.]

Here's a pic.

Mars Rover! So cool!

My brother's ex:
Cool pic... what is it exactly?

MB:
It's a robot car that drives around on Mars doing science experiments and looking for aliens.

EX:
that is so awesome... looking for aliens lol.

MB:
Actually, it is looking for aliens (in the form of amino acids and stuff, aka germs)  

EX:
oh ok, that's a totally different type of alien...

Um, what??????