bloodflow takes a while to catch up with thought. i do the same thing over & over for 5 minutes, and im in the groove.
fMRI tells me so.
same thing for an hour and im toast. i reckon it's some combination of glucose supply and metabolic waste. ah, the likitations of the flesh.
We managed to get out of town for 2 nights. The first night we found an awesome flat-bottomed spruce hollow, sheltered and moist with plenty of firewood, a few miles away from the VLA. It was magical to look down on the VLA on the drive out of the mountains.
The second day was terribly windy.
Gusts to 45 miles an hour? Sounds about right. The car wobbling around on the highway. Somehow we managed to find a strangely sheltered camp spot in the middle of the woods - some quirk of local topography sent the wind whistling over our heads - to cook our mac-n-cheese and snuggle into bed with the sake.
We booked it back home today to get M. to class. I still have a head cold, so today hasn't been too productive otherwise.
Here's where we went:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=87106&daddr=Forest+Rd+549%2FNM-52+to:34.114292,-109.493866+to:US-191+to:87106&hl=en&geocode=%3B%3BFfSKCAIdlkF5-Q%3BFaQOGQId8rZ7-Q%3B&mra=ls&sll=35.160337,-108.132935&sspn=1.609939,3.523865&ie=UTF8&ll=34.800272,-107.882996&spn=1.617033,3.523865&t=h&z=9
in an interview, the famous evolutionary biologist remarked that patience is necessary for science (manipulative paraphrase, that). paint me red and call me a scientist in training. patience and repitition are by no means my strong points!
its the little breaks in life, waiting in line, for laundry, short enough to pause but not long enough to do anything useful, that sends these strange little missives out into the ether...
and yes, the lack of cut-and-paste on this phone is truly a sorrow.
"choice" men, for their part, can gain from this arrangement if they can detect fertile women.... or they can lose, unless they guard the "old lady" from the "wolves". my quotes.
the cost-benefit matrix is pretty simple - all women benefit from one caregiver and one or more hunks, same person or different. some men benefit from caring for one female, some from sleeping with many and caring for one or none, and some take care of others' kids!
Darwin's are examples of theories so clearly articulated as to be self-evident to the receptive listener (though he provided heaps of evidence in support thereof). Here too i see sense. The bar is the microcosm, & experiment bears it out. My fave - fertile fems prefer smell of symmetric males.
Jumping ahead, humans are the only known species in which females don't advertise fertility, In fact, it seems they hide it.
What better place to observe female fertility concealment and mate guarding by males than at a bar.
tic, property-ized, inferior technology (mp3 for the former, something more amorphous for the XO). They both were non-profits that, to an arguable extent, over-sold and under-delivered.
The OLPC is (mostly) dead. Long live Pixel Qi.
Ogg Vorbis is (mostly) dead. Long live Flac.
Flac is my new favorite format. The compressor is blazing fast compared to lossy compressors like mp3 and ogg vorbis - limited, seemingly, by disk I/O. As a format, it seems to do everything better than WAV, while consuming a fraction of the space. I can't seek through them, they can't contain the most basic of meta-data, let alone real honest-to-god ID3 tags. With blank DVDs the price they are, and lossy audio codec wars heating back up with AAC, AAC+, etc., i'm stashing "the goods" away in lossless flac for future transcoding to whatever the heck i want, as needed.
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edit:
The above is a bit too harsh on Xiph.org, i suppose. After peering around, the have a plethora of codex alive and kicking - Speex, OggPCM, a low latency format, and HARK! Theora just hit 1.0 with a $100,000 grant from Mozilla. Holy crap!
So where does that put us? The ipod video *definitely not* supporting Theora? I'm not talking about the Ipod because i have one or love one. I'm talking about it because people buy them and use them in shockingly large numbers. Firefox is capturing marketshare, and is a good vehicle to consume Theora on. Still, what format plays on the device that fits in someone's pocket has a huge impact on the usefulness of the format -- and i don't expect lossless video, really ever. What would be the point?
What i really want is programmable hardware. I don't want use my laptop as a phone or an alarm clock! But I can't really program my alarm clock, let alone my phone, and that really bugs me.
So, as a final and decidedly asymptotic aside, i want to mention that intel just announced an upgrade of it's Rio Rancho, NM chip fab to 35nm process (yes, there's sometimes real news in the Albuquerque Journal after all...). I mention this to highlight how few nanometers there are between 35 and 0! The race towards high transistor density is grinding towards completion.
I hope (though i'm not holding my breath) that we're approaching a new era of *smarter* hardware, not just blazing fast oh-my-god-so-much-in-a-tiny-package hardware -- and my first criteria of smart is *programmable*, making the format wars obsolete. How'd'ya think big brother would feel about that?
Superifially, i feel more relaxed. I'm still not "thirsty" for sleep, 6 or 7 hours seems to do me, which is a bit surprising. This morning, though, the dreams. I was in a hurricane in coastal alaska. Don't ask me how... Not scary, more like thrilling, watching the waves build. Then the eye came over, and i ran out into the sudden clear, giddy. I've always wanted to see the eye of a hurricane.
I feel refreshed. The sun's out. I'm glad that, so it seems, the worst is over.
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