Kate’s visit, part two

Let’s continue this story.

Sunday, January 10, got off to a slow start. I hadn’t been online much in the past few days, so I was surprised to hear that Ocala and other relatively nearby cities had recorded snow. Gainesville didn’t get so much as a flake.

On my list of places to visit was the Florida Museum of Natural History, located next to the Harn Museum of Art, where we had gone the day before. This time, we made it a group thing, with Andy’s dad driving Kate, Andy, and me to the museum.

I had been looking forward to seeing the museum’s butterfly garden, which is probably the star attraction of the whole place. I hadn’t been there since 2005, before I even considered enrolling at UF. I remember my first visit fondly, but apparently I didn’t actually like it that much. I noted at the time that I

could see butterflies flying around everywhere and stuff. Some were small, some were big, some were bright, dark, old, young, whatever. But there were a whole lot of them. I wasn’t at ease with the whole situation. Butterflies and colleges scare me.

This time, the weather meant that our trip to the butterfly garden was kind of a bust. The plants were all covered up due to the cold. Also, the butterflies were going into quasi-hibernation, said a random worker who was so bored that she decided to act as a tour guide for us. They were just lying around on the ground. She would pick one up and open its wings to show us, but some of them broke when she did that. They were dead.

To make up for the freezing-cold walk through the covered garden with dead butterflies lyin’ all over the place, they let us go into the Rearing Lab, where the butterflies (and moths, to be politically correct) are reared. It was there we encountered the mighty Atlas moth, the world’s largest. I remembered seeing one during my last visit, but I think it was a specimen. In the lab, there were a few just hanging out, and one was flying around. You could hear its wings flap. It was intense.

One of the guys at the rearing lab gave us some fun behind-the-scenes facts. He said they were keeping a lot of the butterflies and moths in the lab instead of letting them go out into the butterfly garden, where they might freeze to death. In lieu of fruit, many of them fed on sugar from Q-Tips soaked in—what else?—Gatorade.

After going to the museum, Andy’s dad treated us to dinner at Olive Garden. Kate seemed to like it, so that was good. I think it was a lot of food for her, so she took her leftovers home and I helped her finish them later.

The next day was Monday. Kate wasn’t ready by the time I had to go to work, so she decided to stay behind and meet me on campus for lunch. When lunchtime rolled around, she said she wouldn’t be able to make it (I think she was catching up on sleep), so she agreed to meet me when I got off of work. That would have been all fine and good, except I had to stay late because I’d just received the files for the new Multicultural and Diversity Affairs web site, and they had to go up that day.

So Kate met me at work while I was working late and got to see some of the typical things I do. She works with databases and programming and stuff like that, so it wasn’t unfamiliar to her. I was worried that she would be bored though, so we looked up things to do. It turned out that they were going to screen The Invention of Lying at the student union, so we decided to go to that. On the way there, I called my friend Natasha to wish her a happy birthday.

I liked the movie, and so did Kate. After that, she got an ice cream cone, and I helped her eat it while we were waiting for the bus home.

Kate actually posted this link on my Facebook page a while back. It’s a quiz called “Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From?” See if you can beat my score of 23.

Here’s a CPU-hungry but cool Flash animation about planetary orbits. (Via The Presurfer)

How to Buy A Space Shuttle With Duct Tape

I’ll be back to a regular posting schedule soon, but in the meantime, here’s another guest post from Peter Hurford. Are my “Links At The End of the Post”^TM really that famous?

It’s me again; the Greatplay.net Peter Guy. Jordon is busy “entertaining” — whatever that might mean — so he told me specifically to, and I quote, “[f]eel free to be TWoS’s first repeat guest poster.” So, while Jordon may be coming back on Tuesday, I can sneak this guest post in before he gets back.

But what should I blog about? I warn you that it’s very dangerous to blog without “A Concrete Idea”^TM beforehand. Otherwise you end up with rambly posts like this one, instead of cool things like Monkeys on Typewriters.

-

So, instead I’m going to tell you a little story. Here you go:

How to Buy A Space Shuttle With Duct Tape
by Peter Hurford

First, head down to your basement and into your time machine. The reason the time machine exists in your basement will be explained later — you should not actually need a time machine to complete this journey. You only need Duct Tape.

Operate your time machine and travel into the future until you get to an era where time machines have been invented. Use your $1 million to buy your own time machine. Send this time machine back in time to your basement, present day. This accounts for the time machine in the previous paragraph. Like the time machine, the $1 million will be explained later, and are not needed to start the journey.

After you have your time machine, go back in time to 1920 and open a bank account. Find someone and offer to trade your duct tape for a penny. They will definitely accept, as duct tape had not yet been invented, and thus is an unseen wonder. Deposit your penny into an account with 3% interest, compounded annually. By the time you get back to 2010, you should end up with $0.14 in 1920s money, which, due to interest, is now worth $1.44. Offer to buy money dated before 1920 on ebay, using your new $1.44.

Now that you have $1.44 in 1920s money, go back in time and redeposit that in your account along with the penny you found on the ground. Going back to 2010, you should now have $167.39, with interest and adjusted for inflation. You will have to repeat this process two more times to get $1 million — specifically, you’d have $3,610,088.83. You can then use to buy the time machine in the second paragraph, which will account for the time machine in your basement in the first paragraph.

NASA says that a space shuttle costs about $1.7 billion. Assuming the time machine costs $1 million, you should have $2,610,088.83 left over. Going back and forth between 1920 and 2010, starting with $2,610,088.83, you should need to make two trips to get $1.7 billion — specifically, you’d have $56,291,504,222.13.

So buy the space shuttle. You lose your duct tape in the process, but you get a space shuttle, and you should have enough money left over to launch it. If not, one more trip with your remaining $54.6 billion should net you an additional $7.9 trillion.

-

Since this is the website that requires “Links At The End of the Post”^TM, here’s the compounding interest calculator and the inflation calculator I used for the math in my story.

If Jordon were writing this post, he probably would have linked to stuff off of The J-Walk Blog. The comparison of the Big Mac and Burger King Burger seems interesting, seeing if that commercial is really true. And here’s a picture of the world’s tallest man and the world’s smallest man.

If I were writing for the World of Stuff, my go-to link site would probably be Digg — today there’s this picture of a door, this failure at the FBI, this retrospective about buying drinks for girls at a bar, and how to spot bogus user reviews.

Well, with that, I’m off.

See you around, stuffers!

Reunion

During my trip to Europe over the summer, I visited my friend Laura, whom I hadn’t seen since we were 8. She had moved to Spain and had never come back, as far as I knew. Actually, she did go back every few years to be with some of her family members, but I had never known. She even visited some of her friends from our school one time; she showed me the pictures. She also said she’d be visiting the States again in December, so I knew we had to meet up then.

So during our winter break, my (our) friend Kevin pulled the strings, and we all met in Miami Beach on Sunday along with my sister, who never knew Laura very well, but none of us thought that was a problem. We met in the afternoon and walked around the city for hours, checking out the sights and shops. We also had dinner at a Japanese restaurant, so that was cool. It was a good chance for all of us to reminisce about our school days together.

Eventually, it was late. After a run to McDonald’s for dessert, Laura had to go, and we were all tired from walking so much. Although we had fun, we had to say our goodbyes, hoping that it wouldn’t be another 12 years before we all got together again.

In the interest of tying loose ends, this was one of the Europe ’09 followups I mentioned, in case you were wondering. The other was the announcement of my East Coast road trip since it would be sort of a sequel. You know, if my life were a movie or something.

As I mentioned previously, I got a new phone for Christmas. I’d been using a Nokia 6030, which wasn’t cutting-edge even when I got it three years ago. Now I’ve been giving my LG Xenon (warning: the web site is ridiculous) a try. There are some things about it that I don’t quite like, but I’ll have to get used to them (or go back to using my old phone):

• There’s a semi-secret option to turn off 3G service, which in turn saves battery life. However, phone defaults to using 3G the next time it’s turned on, so it’s kind of pointless unless you have your phone on all the time (which I don’t).
• It’s not possible to set a default ring volume. If you switch to silent or vibrate mode and then back, the ring volume is set to 0.
• After adding all of my contacts and deleting some old ones, I noticed that some contacts I didn’t delete were gone and some that I did delete were not gone.
• My old phone would last over a week between charges; this one seems to last about half as long.

I’ll probably get used to those things, though. I do like that the phone has a keyboard and a touch screen, both of which are new to me. It also saves outgoing text messages, which is something I couldn’t get my old phone to do.

See the winning entry from Discover Magazine’s Evolution in Two Minutes or Less video contest. It’s really cheesy. You can watch some other finalists too. (Via Pharyngula)

More zany mugshots: The 30 Most Memorable Mug Shots of 2009. (Via The Presurfer)

Panoramic Europe / America ’10

During my European adventure this summer, I took a lot of panoramic photos. Well, I took the individual photos that I would later stitch into panoramas once I got back home. And once I got back home, I did just that. Then I posted them on Facebook, which didn’t really do them justice because they were all resized to be all tiny-like. I’d been meaning to post full-size versions of the best ones here on The World of Stuff, so I’ve done that now. Enjoy Panoramic Europe!

The summer of ’08 consisted mainly of me hanging out and throwing around baseballs with some of my friends, but that’s not to say we didn’t have big plans. My friend Nick, a history buff, floated around the idea of going on a road trip to see some Civil War battlefields, possibly the next summer, but that didn’t materialize.

Now, it’s official. Nick, Mike, and TJ asked me if I wanted to go with them on a two-week road trip in June 2010. They plan to visit Atlanta, Washington, New York, Boston, and Gettysburg. It won’t be all battlefields, as I could have guessed. Nick and TJ plan to go to a pizza restaurant near Atlanta to see if they can eat an 11-pound pizza in an hour. And I’m sure that won’t be the only crazy hap to happen.

I told my parents about the plans, and they didn’t say I could go, but they also didn’t say I couldn’t go. I figure that if they let me go to Europe for two months with people they didn’t know, they’ll let me go up north for two weeks with people they do know. Ah, to be trusted. It is good.

It might sound strange that I want to go on this trip because I just said that I don’t have enough money to go on another trip to Europe. But the projected cost for next summer’s road trip is much less than what I spent on plane and train tickets before setting foot in the airport in May. We’re talking apples and oranges here. Well, more like apples and… tiny apples.

Inevitable misreading: “Panoramic Europe-America ’10?” I put spaces around the slash for a reason. No excuses.

Here’s a video showing Every Nickelback Wikipedia Page Vandalism Ever. Warning: there’s Nickelback music, so turn your sound off. (Via waxy.org)

This would be fun to try if I were good at making stuff: Secret Knock Detecting Door Lock. (Via Lifehacker)

Things I’m thankful for

I have a roof over my head. I have shoes on my feet. I have plenty of clothes. I’m not starving. I’m in good health. I’ve never broken any bones. I’ve never had the measles, polio, or rubella. I’ve never gotten the flu.

I’ve gone to decent schools, where I’ve gotten a good education. I have a great job to pay for my schooling, with the help of scholarships and my parents. In fact, I’m in the black.

I had wonderful experiences in Europe this summer. I got to bond with my travel buddy, and with Esperanto, I met family members I otherwise wouldn’t have known about and made a lot of new friends. And I didn’t get robbed.

There are a lot of things I don’t have to worry about. They make the things I do worry about seem trivial by comparison.

When I had to reinstall my operating system, it went pretty smoothly. My bus ride to and from campus isn’t too long. I don’t have a lab this semester, and I have no classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’ve managed to control my weight. This blog seems to have quite a few readers now. And I have a pool at home.

I have good friends, people I can talk to about anything. You know who you are. I have a good family; they’re always there for me. My parents aren’t divorced, and no one in my family is mentally unstable. And I’m enjoying the company of my family today.

I guess I have it better than most people, and that is something to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

And now, some useful graphs, both via waxy.org:

How safe is the HPV vaccine Gardasil? Is it as dangerous as the disease it aims to prevent? Find out.

The Billion Dollar Gram: It’s hard to visualize billions of dollars, so this graph compares some billion- and trillion-dollar values that are often bandied about.

Playing Russian roulette with the Black Jack Taco?

Recently, I was enjoying lunch at Taco Bell with a friend when she pointed out that the food I was eating wasn’t particularly healthy. Normally, that wouldn’t put me off too much—I knew where we were, after all—but I heard her out.

I was eating the new Black Jack Taco, which is a standard taco but with pepper jack sauce and a black (or very dark blue) shell. She said that there must have been a lot of food coloring in the shell and that it was carcinogenic—as in, cancer-causing.

Pish-posh, I said. It wasn’t like I was eating a lot of them. I had only had this exotic taco a few times.

It didn’t matter, she said. Even if you’ve only had it once, you’re not off the hook. If you’re unlucky, you could end up getting cancer from one drag of a cigarette, a single sunburn—or, apparently, a black taco.

Could it be true? And if so, how could the FDA allow such a thing?

I decided to find out what kind of dye was used in the Black Jack Taco and whether it was dangerous at all. But Taco Bell apparently had other ideas. Their list of ingredients of ingredients only mentions regular taco shells, not the dyes they use for some menu items:

Corn, Vegetable Oil (May Contain One Or All Of The Following: Soybean, Corn, Or Cottonseed Oil), Oat Fiber, TBHQ (Used As A Preservative).

A handy tooltip reveals that TBHQ is tertiary butylhydroquinone, but you probably knew that already. Wikipedia says it in fact may cause cancer in large amounts, but that wasn’t what I was trying to find out here.

Their Black Jack Taco page isn’t helpful either; it just gives nutrition facts and allergen information. (The taco doesn’t contain wheat. Yay?) Google searches turn up nothing but puzzled reviews and people saying, “It’s dye, right?”

I guess there’s no way to know what sort of food coloring is used without asking Taco Bell themselves. I could try, but it would probably be off the menu by the time they got back to me. In fact, it might already be off the menu now. Their special offers don’t stick around very long.

As for my lunch: I finished the Black Jack Taco without much hesitation, but I haven’t touched one since.

And now, the links:

Clips from one episode of The Jay Leno Show raise the question: Is Jay Leno a corporate shill? (Via waxy.org)

Yet another interpretation of the Super Mario Bros. theme music, this time by a band called Gameboys. It’s very well done! (Via waxy.org)

Smile

Sometimes you meet someone and the thinkable happens.

It starts out perfectly simply. You get along well and become friends. But then there’s something else: their laugh, something in the way they move, or their general outlook on life really gets your attention. They don’t have to be around to make you smile.

You see and talk to them often, and you want to let them know just how you feel. What do you do? Do you become a creeper? No. You just talk openly about it when you feel the moment is right. If they’re really your friend, they’ll listen.

And what if they say they don’t feel quite the same about you? Do you stop being their friend? That’s childish. At this age, you should know it’s hardly the worst thing in the world. The truth is that you still have a good friend.

Like any friend, you want them to be happy, and the best way to help is to set an example. Smile: a good friend is forever.

And now, the links.

One of those sites that concisely answers the a question posed by its domain name: howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Apparently, baseball used to be pretty crazy. Here are the 10 Craziest Baseball Rules. (Via The Presurfer)

Get databased

As you may know, I volunteer for Get Carded, a student group that raises awareness about organ donation on Florida college campuses. It’s my third year with them, and this time, some things are different. One of the two co-directors of the group has graduated, and his would-be replacement is no longer around due to some drama that apparently occurred over the summer. It’s unfortunate because we’d all been a friendly bunch for as long as I’d been a member.

But that wasn’t the only big change to happen the summer. Get Carded’s parent organization has been put in charge of Florida’s organ donor database, and it’s now taking registrations online. In the past, we distributed organ donor cards, but now we just tell people to go to the web site (or to mail in a form). Our first tabling event was last week, and I had to update my spiel.

The tabling was part of a week-long PR blitz for homecoming week. It started on Monday night when we painted the 34th Street Wall, the only place in town where graffiti is tolerated. Our tabling was Wednesday, and the group also made itself present at the homecoming parade on Friday, although I pulled out of my commitment to that one due to unforeseen circumstances. (I’d been at probably every event for the past two years, so I felt I had the privilege. Also, the co-directors didn’t care.)

Incidentally, the new database makes the name “Get Carded” go from confusing to completely inaccurate. We were told that there was a strong push to change the name, but one of the better-established chapters wouldn’t have it. Branding, y’know.

Are you a Florida resident? Are you an organ donor? (Check your driver’s license if you’re not sure; it would say “Organ Donor” under your signature.) If you’re not, go to donatelifeflorida.org to sign up right now. It just takes a minute, and you’ll be able to edit your personal details whenever they change. (For the question “How did you learn about Florida’s donor registry?” we ask people to select “College campaign” and then specify “UF.” It make it sounds like a cheesy competition, but that’s really how the state organization judges our success.)

And if you have any questions about becoming an organ donor, just ask me.

Remember when people used more than one search engine? A lot of those old ones are still around. See Popular Search Engines in the ’90s: Then and Now. (Via The Presurfer)

For the people who are older than I am: Old Operating Systems Don’t Die.

Brain damage

My right brain and left brain need to sit down and have a chat sometime.

Sometimes I’m caught having to choose between what’s logically sound and what feels good. It doesn’t have to be anything big; even little things can tear me to pieces.

For a while now, my parents have been giving me scratch-off lottery tickets as small gifts. Playing the lottery is a bad idea if you want to win. It is a system designed to make money; otherwise, it wouldn’t exist. As I’ve been more and more concerned about saving money, I asked my parents to stop buying me lottery tickets and to maybe give me the money they would have otherwise spent on the tickets instead. Of course, I regretted it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

But scratch-offs were fun, they said. They didn’t sound too happy, so I backpedaled. I had wanted to categorically reject all gambling because it’s a bad idea that makes people lose money, but I compromised myself because my emotions got the better of me. I feel like I should be able to say, “Please don’t buy me lottery tickets, do something useful with your money instead,” but on the other hand, I want my parents to be happy. Also, seeing if you’ve won can be entertaining, and the proceeds of the Florida Lottery fund education.

There are always two sides to every issue. Why do they both have to have merit? It only makes life more difficult for those of us who want to make principled decisions.

And then there are the Hare Krishna types who serve lunch at my university. Krishna Lunch is considered an institution because they’ve been doing it for many years. People like the food, and it comes at a competitive price. Every day around lunchtime, students line up on the plaza to be served while Hare Krishnas play their Hare Krishna music and chant Hare Krishna.

I’ve had Krishna Lunch once or twice. It was pretty tasty. I might like to take advantage of their cheap lunch offers more often, but I’m concerned about who I give my money to and what it says about me. I’m obviously not too keen on giving my money to a religious organization because then they have that much more of an ability to spread their religious nonsense.

In my research, I’ve found that Krishna Lunch is a nonprofit, which puts me at ease somewhat. But there’s still another issue that I think is important. I feel that if I’m caught with one of their paper plates full of unidentifiable food, there should be some kind of disclaimer above my head stating that I don’t necessarily endorse the beliefs or practices of the organization.

I guess I might as well go through with it; I don’t think anyone would judge me. I should be more concerned about whether I would judge myself. And I did eat at a Chick-fil-A recently, which is like giving money to a church (and getting a crappy sandwich and delicious fries in return). But what would you do if you were me?

Less money, mo’ problems.

Slate asks: Why Do We Call Galileo Galilei by His First Name? (Via J-Walk Blog)

This chart could be handy for me now that I’m dabbling in buying perishable food: The Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad. (Via All About Me – And Then Some)

Hello September

Things have been going here in Gainesville. Over the summer, my friend Evan decided to get a band together with me, my former suitemate Cameron, and one of his other friends. We got together for a practice last Tuesday (except for Cameron, who was getting ready to go somewhere). We tried to decide on a song to play and picked “Hotel California.”

I brought my Epiphone hollow-body guitar, a low-end version of a Gibson. The other guitarist, the guy I don’t know too well, had an actual Gibson hollow-body. Now I think I know how a girl feels when another girl wears the same dress as her to a party. But this guy has mad guitar skillz, so it’s all good.

I haven’t been in anything that could be loosely termed a band since some of my junior-high buds and I played in public for the last time four years ago. I’ve been in some fruitless and abortive attempts to start or join bands since then, so I’d like to see things turn out differently this time.

By the way, this new group has a name: Rubber Band. Evan doesn’t care if the name is already taken, which, given my past experiences, is an admirable quality.

For one of my classes, I have to use a program called MATLAB (I guess you’re supposed to shout it). You may have heard of the program. Turns out it’s proprietary and expensive. Actually, I don’t have to use MATLAB!!! per se, but the code I write has to work with it. I know that free alternatives exist, but to be absolutely sure, I really should use Matlab. What to do?

The professor suggested going to the university’s computer labs because Matlab is installed on the computers there. But I don’t have the time for that. I wondered if it might be installed on the so-called CPU servers, which I already had remote access to. (These things come with taking computery classes, of course.) It turns out that I can log in to one of those computers and use X11 forwarding over SSH to run Matlab. In English: I can run the program on a different computer and have its window show up on my computer as if it were any other program of mine.

Running Matlab this way is slow because the remote computer has to handle a bunch of other people’s stuff at the same time, but it’s definitely better than having to go to the labs whenever I want to do my homework. And it makes use of a cool feature that will make Windows users salivate even though it’s been available on Unix-like operating systems for 20 years. To top it off, I made a launcher for Matlab in my Applications menu (the command is “ssh -CtX [my user name]@[server] matlab“) so I can access it about as easily as program I actually have installed. I am clever.

Here’s a mesmerizing video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas sky. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The New York Times has a graph showing sales of different music formats between 1973 and 2008. Looks like the music industry’s sales are down. Yes! Maybe now they’ll get some common sense. But probably not. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Do you like baseball or statistics? I like at least one of those, and I find these baseball-related graphs to be interesting. Example: How often have the Canadian MLB teams played a game with “O Canada” as the only national anthem? (Via waxy.org)