"
Children of Men"
Truth in fiction? With articles about decreased sperm count in men living in industrialized countries, hormone-laden food affecting our kids' development, and now inadvertent cocktails of every drug ever administered forming from human bodily waste that filters into our water supply... One figures that whatever eventually happens in reality will defy and exceed even the extreme speculation in movies like this one.
Really, really good movie. Nihilistic as hell (until the 'morrow at the end), but very accurate depictions of human reactions under stress.
|
| Latest website
Higher bonuses than ever, in the face of worsening performance?
That’s a clear symptom of the final theoretical 3rd wave in Dow Theory.
I’ve had bearish feelings every time I read about how the current administration waves its hands and points at Iraq every time economic issues come up. I predicted the housing slowdown within 2-3 years to my parents in 2004 (and that was *before* I really started following finance news more carefully), and now there’s this reported symptom. Pessimistic view through to 2009 (current downside potential to 11,000 unlikely; more likely over time, but downside will rise to 12,500 by 2009). I’ll be curious to look back two years from now and see if this was accurate.
Whatever, I was going to blither on about it, but who cares?
I have to go promote the military-industrial complex. B/c it and health care / insurance do well in uncertain times.
[Listening to Workbench, “Air Cargo”]
Oorgh.. Must cut 8 more minutes off presentation… I keep clocking in at a hair over 30 mins. 30 info-dense slides. Not sure it can be done. Must… hack and slash.
“War and uncertainty loom large!”
“Buy defense sector stocks!”
“Buy, buy, buy!”
Cripes. OK, break, then one more pass before I pass out.
The IPCC’s AR4 Summary for Policymakers is out. It’s like a State of the Environment address every 5 years.
It’s an extremely compact document. Like having 0.5% body fat. Fairly readable, since it is intended for politicians, not lawyers or scientists.
Some say we’re already beyond the IPCC’s worst case scenario. I say so what? All we can do is the best we can do. So ignore that and let’s look at what we can do:
Whole Foods has 30 ways to make a reasonably easy effort.
Plant a tree (for those with yards).
Strive to avoid extensively packaged products. Aim to reduce your monthly garbage output by 10%. I could do it by going cold turkey on prepared snacks (which aren’t good for me anyway, like chips and goldfish crackers). The rest of my output tends to result from allergies, so that’ll be a bit more challenging to reduce. I think I only take out one grocery bag of trash every 2 weeks, anyway.
I reuse all my coke machine soda cartons in various ways. Formerly, they were a major source of cardboard for armor patterning. And whether pattern-cut or not, it all eventually goes to the recycling center in monthly drop-offs en route to school.
Greenstyle Magazine put out a list of 101 things (from piddly to life-changing) you can do to green up.
Got an LCD monitor yet?
Avoid drivethroughs.
Eat less meat.
Skip the bottled water (or at least reuse the bottles like some people I know do). This one is huge. Stupid big. I appreciate the water snobbery, b/c I am one. That’s why I ruthlessly recycle my bottles for drinking, then for sharp cutting practice, then I finally recycle them monthly. And anyone who’s seen me at practice or an event knows I have that obnoxiously modern Nalgene bottle. Leather wrapping. Someday. Gulf Wars? Reasonable target.
Bring your own bags (cloth or otherwise) to the grocery store. I use my 4 Windrose Armoury bags for that.
My friend and WMA partner of 6 years, Chris C., is as near to a paragon of environmentalism as I know or can tolerate. :) He was on Green Mountain back when rates were $.08 / KWH and he paid $.23 / KWH (it certainly discouraged high usage, in addition to being green). Soon as he got his new job, he ditched the old Pontiac for a Prius. He’s been bringing his own cloth bags and tupperware containers to Whole Foods for as long as I’ve known him. One of my skeptical friends thought he was just another big talker, until we went out after practice one night, and we observed Chris being his normal, low impact self.
He’ll never know I wrote this, but I’ve always admired him for it.
Yeah, there’re no doubt greener folks in Austin, but I live in Houston, and we’re trying.
And I loved the fact that there were 2 Prii at Roses (Maaggie and .. I don’t know if the other Prius’s owners are on Xanga). But go you. You guys are making it possible for people like me to buy a used one in 5 years. :) Well, that may or may not be sensible, with the rumors of expensive battery replacement. I’ll do more thorough research when I get closer to replacing my soul-blackening SUV (that has served me well and with only moderate complaints these past 7 years).
[Listening to Verso, Reflections album, “Rhymes with Seven” track. Good stuff.]
OK, I’m only feeling awesome for values of it where “awesome” = “bleary”. :P
Wet b/c it’s raining outside. Was raining at 1 a.m., raining at 4 when I got up to take an apparently sympathetic leak (the sound of rain is pretty audible in my room), and still raining now.
Went out to grab some class notes from my car, and figured I’d do a quick little morning kung fu routine in the grass. Whee! Now I’m cold. And wet.
My shoulders were really sore when I woke up, though, and I had a groggy moment of panic — “Oh noes! Delayed injury from my not-so-awesome Friday night flipping out!”
Then, stupid bint that I was, I finally realized it was b/c of the 3×4 sets of behind-the-head pull ups I did in my room yesterday. I know, certain of my muscle groups (where certain = the majority) are wussbags. Including my brain. B/c the brain is a muscle and mine hasn’t gotten enough exercise.
But I heard back yesterday from the exec director of a client organization I had for one of my classes. I recently e-mailed her, asking about where the org was, a year after our group did its research and recommendations on improving volunteer recruitment and mgmt. Preliminary reply indicates that they’ve increased their volunteer base by 52%! That’s something like almost twice what they intended, when we worked with them.
And I found <drum roll> Eli Steenput’s website as a 3- or 4-level deep random web trawl.
Who’s Eli Steenput, you ask?
Well, he’s only one of the cool kids who had a hand in the whole historical armor / WMA research thing back in the early-early ’90s. He once wrote an article about sword fullers. Certain engineering-minded females in Austin who probably don’t normally read my Xanga ramblings would get a kick out of this (nudge nudge, Colsith).
The cross section is similar to an I-beam (if you squish the serifed ends of the I and draw the resultant blobs out into tapering points — voila, fullered sword blade cross-section). And thus, like an I-beam, it is *not* stronger than an unfullered sword of the original weight (before removal of material from the fuller grooves). However, it retains something like 50% of the strength in the direction we most care about (i.e. the cut), while losing 80% of stiffness in the other direction (the flat of the blade) but also 80% of the weight! Well, that’s if you made an I-beam shaped sword. Actual weight loss and stiffness change may vary. See your blacksmith for details.
And it is definitely stronger than an unfullered sword made with the same mass as the fullered blade. A rough eyeball estimate suggests the fullered blade has 8x the stiffness on the direction of the flat (but is still absurdly wimpy compared to the more massive, pre-fullered blade) and 3x the stiffness on the direction of the edge.
It’s a fine distinction, but one that I hear incorrectly made all the time (fullers stiffen the sword). Well, not really incorrectly. It’s incorrect if you grind or cut a fuller. I just realized it’s correct if you forge a blade, then hammer in a fuller, working the blade hot. But since most modern makers cut their fullers, then they’re technically weakening the blade. Hrm.. I should point that out to Steenput and see what he has to say, 9 years after the fact.
Boy, let me tell you, thorny problems like this really keep me up at night. (Not!)
But now you know (and probably don’t care). And knowing’s half the battle, G.I. Joe.
And now I know that Eli’s been teaching dagger plays at HEMAC. Pity he’s out of Belgium and I’m here. At least he’s got an awesome pictorial tutorial on making German kebabs.
Oh, and this is cool, too: Skewers for German schweinhunds.
Finished 6/9 weekend to-do items for school/work yesterday. Just added one, and two can’t be done until Monday now, so I think I’ve earned a fencing practice. Now if only we can pause the rain in the 1-4 p.m. timeslot.
Can’t dally too long, though. Got a 30-slide PowerPoint presentation to rehearse for Monday night — with a 20-min time limit. We’re going to break the sound barrier on this one.
“Look. Data.”
“Oh, more data.”
“Data on your mom.”
“Company-specific data.”
“Fun corporate logos promoting the military-industrial capitalist running pig-dog lackeys of the Western oppressors.”
“Questions?”
Waiting for people at school. Again. Well, sometimes I’m late for the meeting, and sometimes the meeting is late for me.
So last night after work training, I went the 4 blocks to Rice, and did some longsword exercises. Really worked out some of my lesser-used muscle groups. I think it’ll really help. But today, I can barely walk without falling over, due to the soreness in my lower legs, above the ankles. Good stuff. :)
On the way back to the stadium lot and the car (yeah, I know it’s lonely, but it’s so close to park coming from Kaplan, and the walk probably does me good), I was thinking about stances, and started working through some of Duncan’s hip-swinging stance changes (back stance to forward stance, advance with a step, repeat mirrored). No one was around except for folks walking in the distance, so I just let myself fall into the rhythm, and was really feeling the burn about a football field and a half later.
Then the burn overwhelmed the zen, and I gingerly walked the short remainder of the way to my car.
Oh, hey, the team’s here.
<real cocky and Italian>
“Catch you on the flipsi-ide.”
For about a week now, I’ve had this pair of welts in the crook of my left elbow. Spaced about 3/8″ apart, they felt painful the first few days, akin to being pricked by some nasty plant or bee sting. They’ve mostly faded now, but for a while, I was wondering if it was cause for concern.
So either I ran into some aggressive foliage and don’t recall it, or maybe I was bitten by a spider in my sleep or something. After all, the average person … <searching the Internuts>
Huh. OK, so the average person *doesn’t* swallow 4, 14, or 42 spiders a year or in her lifetime. Get the skinny on the appetite for arthropods.
Well, if it was a spider bite, with a fang spread of 3/8″, that thing must be gigantic — a remnant of the brood of Shelob, daughter of vile Ungoliant. Hiding, lurking in this Sixth Age of Middle-Earth, biding its time in the dank depths of … my cupboard?
Well, I’m not dead from poison, so it’s probably something much more inane, like walking into a prickly bush and not remem–
<Urk!>
<thud>
[This is totally not a serious thing. I’m waiting on group members at school right now.]
Ξ November 11th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ School |
[Currently listening to Company - A Musical Comedy (1995) by Stephen Sondheim]
Defense industry analysis due tomorrow evening. Recommend hold Alliant (ATK).
Customer satisfaction analysis and hand-holding instructions due in 2 weeks.
That’s all.
:(
Ξ January 21st, 2007 | → Comments Off | ∇ School |
The gods are takin’ a tuppin’ liberty with this old son’s fine morn.
(more…)
Ξ December 27th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ School |
[Currently listening to Bug Powder Dust, by Kruder & Dorfmeister]
Made it to the end of the semester. I tried to front-load my work, b/c I knew things would get a little crazy towards semester’s end. Sure enough, the last couple of weeks saw the wheels start to come off the wagon. I felt like I cleared 12/14/06 by the skin of my teeth.
Then I found out I made all A’s. First semester ever (usu. had at least an A- before) at UH. Good stuff.
Ξ December 15th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ School |
In the past semester, all 3 of my marketing professors have pulled me aside after class.
(more…)
Ξ December 5th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ School |
Well, that’s (almost) it for the semester.
(more…)
« Previous Page —
Next Page »
"
