So this is why I love UCSC! There's all of this building art, and just art in general all over campus. You'll just be walking along and see something like this come out of nowhere.

Baby and momma.

Whole picture, see how many symbols you can find!

Ok so an update on the Haiti situation:

Here's an 11pg long NY Times article about the troubles in Haiti. I haven't read all of it, but what I have looked at makes no mention of the mercs we were talking about before. However, it does look like some shady shit has been going on down there that reeks of US involvement. Somehow I'm reminded of Costa Rica and El Salvador in the 80s...

NY Times Article

I recently read, or rather listen to, George Orwell's Animal Farm. What a great book. I've never seen such a funny, thought provoking book which is so short! Allusions to everything from media to working class heroes. If anyone reading this hasn't read this book, you must go out and read it. It is about the rise and fall of socialism, and pertains to many things going on today in our own government.

So I recently discovered addons.mozilla.org

I highly recommend you check out the "extensions" section...specifically fasterfox and customize google. Customize google has some nice features like removing the ads and privacy stuff like removing google analysis. Might be good considering the gov't is hitting the major search engines up for information on people...Yahoo and MSN have complied, but Google has not. I wouldn't count on that lasting forever. Is the freedom the internet has provided in its death rattle?

Ivestigative Blogging?
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/19/blogger_merc_spies_i.html

REALLY?

How fuckin cool! So could it be that the internet really has opened up a free-of-govt-regulation media format where issues like this can get some air-time? Doubtful, but here's to hoping! Watch for a new string of blogging lawsuits.

Also in the news: the DC cleanup. Can you believe that they are actually going to pass some lobbying legislation? I mean, we all know that whatever legislation the DO pass will be all show, no go, since it's unlikely they're gonna bite the hands that feed them, but at least the problem is being discussed, instead of just brushed under the dirty ass Washington rug. One thing I read in the paper today was that some Republican from Montana was trying to dump off his Abramoff (the lobbist who started this fiasco) on a Native American tribe in Montana. The tribe was like fuck you we don't want your dirty Washington whore payoff monies, we'd rather be poor. Props Natives, always gotta give them props! Also most Congress people are trying to dump off their dirty money on charities etc.

Ok, anybody ever wonder why the US doesn't have any maglev trains? Well, they may just have some soon...

http://www.calmaglev.org/
http://www.bwmaglev.com/
http://www.maglevpa.com/


Interesting...

Mmmmmm...happy chicken. They look happy don't they? We'll see how they turn out, I'm actually letting them brew as I write.

Browning phase-should've let them brown a bit more, but I was afraid for my onion.

Simmer phase- making the house start to smell yummy.

This is a good article about one of my favorite things in the entire world!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4607642.stm

You gotta be fuckin kidding me. What the fuck?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4605202.stm
And seriously, physics is having major funding problems? Somebody recently told me that the physics funding for the last fifty years has been a consequence of us making the atom bomb, and politicians were hoping that we'd come up with another, newer and better one...then in the late 80s, also coincidentally around the time of the end of the cold war, people started deciding that we want to live forever, and hence all of the funding in biological and health sciences...and what will happen, is that people will realize that they don't want to live forever, or at least not with the current quality of life, and so funding will slowly run out for that...thoughts?

renascent \rih-NAS-uhnt\, adjective:
Springing or rising again into being; showing renewed vigor.

Good word.

Fatness:
So I found this little graph in the San Jose Mercury News this morning. I digitized it, and graphed it for your pleasure.

"Opinions on Weight: Americans' attitudes toward overweight people have become more accepting. Percentage of people who agree with the statement: People who are not overweight are more attractive."



I don't know that I would be so quick to say people have become more accepting, I think people just aren't being hypocritical. Take a look at the increase in overweight and obese people. While overweight has remained steady, obesity has taken off, meaning that healthy people have become overweight, while and equal amount of overweight people have become obese.


Scary stuff. On a happy note, California will probably ok funds for solar panel subsidies. This will increase the demand, which will in turn lower the cost...which will increase use, etc. The are hoping to refund 1/3 of the cost of a solar panel system.

Went to SF on Saturday. Had a good time, and drove over to a friends bday party in Berkely. I was coming into town an hour or so before sunset so I decided to brave the campus and go up hill until I could get a view of the sunset over the city. I kept walking always trying to take the steepest route, until finally I got the shot I was looking for all day.

On Sunday I went for a little 20 miler to Davenport and back. It was good got to give the new cassette a good testing. I'm not sure what I think, probably needs to get tweeked.

A fully functional garden clock.

So this could have been a totally sweet pic, except that I had my fucking camera on 400ISO. I want to scream whenever I do this, geez.

Nice picture of the city. I had to shoot this betwen trees. So I climbed up this very steep hill just out front of LBNL (Lawrence Berkely Nat'l Lab). I was kinda worried cause I was by a chain link fense, and I'd hate to be mistaken for a terrorist.
So this is the picture I walked up onto Berkeley's Campus. I wanted to stop off on Treasure Island (left-center/bridge), but the turn off is tiny, with 50 mph cars behind you. I also thought I'd take the chance to appreciate zoooom.

Last rays of sunshine.

So guess what I did? I swapped out my old cassette (the cogs on the rear wheel of my bike) for a newer cassette with a larger range of gear ratios. I'm so excited because it makes going up steep hill much easier. I can also go a good 5-10 mph faster downhill. Better than all of that, I learned how to take apart my rear axle and gears, which I assume that my front axle is the same as the rear so I know how to take apart that too! I road it up to campus this morning with a lot of weight on my bike (I also got a rack for my shoes and clothes), and I gotta say I don't think I could've done it without that new cassettttttte!

So America West has their hub in Phonix, AZ which happens to be very interesting from the sky. Of course there is no water which makes for a very divided landscape.

So this is a subdivision from the air. Isn't it crazy the drastic lines where the desert meets the manicured lawns of soccer moms.

I mean seriously, a fucking golf course in the middle of the fucking desert! You gotta be shitting me. Do you know how much water a fucking golf course uses in a day? I sware people like this piss me off to no end.

So aquaducts have been around since when, like 1000BC? Good to see we've advanced so much in the last 3000 years.

So I think this is a trailer park, look at the watering hole in the middle. The other thing I thought was very interesting was that this kinda looks like an old socket 7 (or was it 9) intel processor...

Caught the shadow of my plane landing. I though it was cool cause you can see the guy working in the boom truck.

So I recently got a climbing harness, and I am currently learning how to climb. It's really fun because you get good exercise and you really have to think about what you're doing. Here's come pics.

I like the slippers!

Planet Rock, Pontiac, MI. Not bad of a place, but their routes were hella hard.

These are some younger people climbing.

Hey everyone, I've been off the blog scene for a bit...crazy Christmas shit! It's good to be back on the west coast. It smells so much better. So I (literally) only saw the sun. The key word here is saw, not hung out, but saw, as in oh hey look over there, the sun just came ou....oh well there is goes again, saw the sun a whomping 6 times! Six! Seis! Seriously, how did I live like that? It's good to be back to where the sun says good-bye every night.

Tom Robbins quote of the week:

"'What is it,' Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, 'that separates human beings from the so-called lesser animals? [As I see it] half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism- as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons- Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.'" -Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates