Simulation at fingertips

Here's a peculiar video about computer simulations integrated with an awesome video interface.



In fact, tailoring special physics courses to computer game programmers has been an issue for a while now. They would do the stuff similar to this video, but mostly in gaming environment - trying to make it as [un]natural as possible. It will be great when this will become a mature technology. Too bad that people that are actually expected to know their stuff will be tempted to use a toy simulation like this. I call this toy simulation because the actual scientific computing involves quite complicated algorithms for unsolved problems, highly tuned for efficiency and usually ran on a supercomputer or a cluster. Fancy software but no fancy interfaces there.

Relevant for everyone is the part where the computer guesses the shapes and special marks to interpret them as certain objects and properties. It may well be that the way is being paved for a better computer interfacing, of the sci-fi movies sort. Toshiba's TablePC technology may turn out to be an early bird for these. Goodbye keyboards?

Just got from a panel at the U - "Do Organized Religions Suppress Women's Rights?". The panel didn't really work coherently, and there was little common ground to be found, and little discussion on the subject matter. Most everybody simply cited some great equality passages from their scriptures and named fictional important women figures in the religion's history.

Muslim chicks clad in linens head-to-toe boldly claimed Islam does not oppress women's right whatsoever, that's all a thing of the past. You could literary see how submissive and immature these women (girls?) were. Apparently they just don't get it.

The only standouts and perhaps the only true believers there sure enough were two Christian chicks from the "Women of Virtue" organization. Both are converts. Suzi Sunderman is a self-described former lesbian of the butch variety. Juliane Moch was a hardcore bondage fan. They sat at the center, a blond and a brunette, with hair of the same shoulder length, identical style jackets and t-shirts and a hint of being overweight on their bodies. They are the same now, faceless stamps of a cristian identity model.

No big surprise they found what they wanted in Christianity. Jesus was obviously gay, and those trips to the lake with a bunch of dudes look really fishy now that the "Brokeback Mountain" is out. The whole crucifixion is plain hard-core BDSM.

Neither of the "virtual" ladies was able to get the questions read out by the host, and had to write them down first. They've obviously been emotionally disturbed for most of their lives. Still they were bold enough to preach to the perfectly stable audience. Feeling of a superiority so Christian indeed.

The dirty secret they did not know about was that they could not preach to the sane audience. Both tried the standard Christian approach of telling their very own and very personal, though not very original, sin-fast-and-find-Jesus and live-happy-thereafter stories. The story breaks, they cannot find the words and there's no real emotion coming through. That is all because of a dirty little thing - they let a shadow of doubt and criticality into their minds - they actually tried thinking about their faith, if only for a moment. The room is full of people of various religions and of outright atheists. Audience meets them with straight faces and they cannot help but start thinking who are these people and what you can say to convince them. That's the trap right there - they reflect on their own beliefs, and you just don't do that if you want to remain a Christian. Certainly you got to shut down your brains completely if you want to preach.

I'd wish this was a start for the virtual ladies, but I doubt it will, and that's just too bad.

Coffee Experiment

It is the second consequent day of the coffee experiment, and it's starting to feel real. A sense of missing something really important in life, a very personal and irreversible loss - and I am only doing this for a month! I am sluggish and feel really inefficient, and a puny voice in my head says I really should get on top of things. Just have a cup. I'm keeping far from coffee shops and coffee machines of any kind.

A dull pain in my knees and the lower back, but just the right side. I think its my kidney. I fell asleep during quite an interesting talk today, and with my head bending backwards over my back launched a headache. Must have looked really funny. That's two tylenols down, no caffeine.

I am starting to eat more, and that may be a problem. Still it looks like I am making it. The withdrawal peaks somewhere between days 3 to 5, and I am somewhere at 2½, with Monday hiatus. Once you get to this point, you gain momentum and feel really determined to make it.

I had a coffee-free Sunday past weekend. I like coffee and have been drinking it in various forms for a long time now. The problem is, I've got to the point of drinking it instead of water. Evenings have long been a taboo - that's the best thing I've ever done to my day rhythm, but other then that I would use any opportunity to down a dose. Limiting did not work. I had to stop drinking my office nearly-free nearly-coffee, and that meant taking from home - cold, vented and often forgotten, or buying from Startbucks - but I have a much better use for the buck.

So this Sunday I just did not start my dripper, and went without coffee for the whole day. Sounds easy enough, but now that I think about it, I probably did not have a coffee-free day in at least five years. That's right, not a single day!

It felt OK, slow and even a little lethargic, perhaps a little disoriented. I was still enthusiastic enough to go out and later watch a movie, and make plenty of calls. Nothing like a withdrawal, really. It hit me in the night, right in base of my skull, strong enough a headache to wake me up. So Monday morning was Excedrin (that has plenty of caffeine by itself, so that broke the abstinence) and a whole lot of coffee. Today, I did it again, and I'll keep the pills ready and my fingers crossed.

On Saturday, my page was visited by the first three visitors. One from Virginia, one from Neuenwege in north-west Germany, and one from Manila. This is quite an amazing demographics. While these people probably got here by some sort of a random blog pick and are unlikely to come back, welcome nonetheless! You are the first visitors to my page other then myself :)

The sailors are happily back home, and now we know they've been tortured. Here's how serious they are. Notice their brand new uniforms. These guys seem to change their clothes as often as fashion models. Well, see how angry they've been while in captivity. Looks like dudes simply got scared shitless that they'll have to stay in Iranian prison with a bunch of hairy locals, and were ready for anything. That scared without anybody extinguishing cigarette butts on their asses, not even being piled naked or made to masturbate in front of the camera. You know, the innocent, Abu Ghraib kind of stuff.
Now the British are trying real hard to suck at least a little bit of heroism out of this story, but it just does not fall together. These kids are no braver then your average janitor, and may have sold out, too. They really should have hired Carl Rove for this. Pretty show with heroic freeing of the soldiers by a special unit, complete loss of memory and the chick that only remembered she was ass-raped would immediately follow. Sounds familiar?

A story is breaking out about Citibank giving kickbacks to universities for advertising the company to the students as their 'preferred lender'. Amusing part in it all are the student loan stories that will inevitably pop out. Rachel Sullivan from a CNN story has amassed a 100 grand debt, and yes, she "partially" blames the Citibank. Really, this is your typical phony college gal, with all the gadgets and cheap makeup. She must think frugality stands for a kind of perversion, and you can bet she hadn't yet tried that one. What is really needed is an ugly chick with tons of debt and skin problems. That will break the ice!

See that chick? That's right, of the British sailors-being-released. What's she's really thinking is "man, I wish I knew and lost some weight". This undoubtedly proves she's not in the conspiracy.

Decomposing bodies smell like vanilla. While it is not clear how much and after what time, it is quite clear how full of shit the catholic church is. All kinds of it, including mummy remains kind of shit. BBC link

The story is about Joan of Arc's remains, which in fact turned out to be pieces of a human and cat mummies, perhaps Egyptian. It's sad how much hypocrisy this story keep reveling throughout the centuries. Joan was burned as a witch, for fun of the crowd. It shows just how much the church was ready to use its claimed connection with god for purely political reasons and not a tad more. These days, churches claim they have bigger, ehmm, stronger, ehmm better family values and what not. Yes, that and a connection with god.

Joan was canonized whopping half a thousand years later, made into a saint by the same church that burned her for witchcraft. Not only did they not give a shit for burning people alive just to get rid of them, they did not give a shit to admit to doing that. They went even further. They burned her for fun and profit, and they canonized her just because the chick went so well with the crowd. Somebody really wants to be popular, huh?

To give more grounds to the canonization, some crap was presented a century ago to be her unrotten remains. These are then declared sacred and people think somehow being associated with these will help them heal, which is your textbook example of neurosis. I just wish it turned out to be a mummy's dick in that jar.

The sad part of it all? It took more then half a millennium for this turn. And nobody will make a connection with today's most popular schizophrenics.

Just watched "the girls next door". The movie's great, should have watched it the day I got it. I was reluctant because the whole story of the school senior wanting to be a politician and how he's all determined and then faces the porn girl next door dilemma blah blah blah sounded too much like yet another Hollywood story of highly conscious losers. You know, taxi drivers who keep never forget their plan for the whole life and strip girls saving for retirement, that is when they turn 25.

This movie's just fine - everyone's as immature as they should be, but additionally Elisha Cuthbert is awesome looking and playing. Ironically, the dude does become more like his hero JFK. He's just eighteen and already has questionable connections with women and businesses that look more like mafia clans.