Ponderings
How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven.
-Robert A. Heinlein
So, being jobless and not in school, I spend most of my days (er, currently nights since I seem to be sleeping in four hour shifts at the moment) thinking alot about well, everything which crosses my mind.
I live with a very cute but very polydactyl cat. I've mentioned him before, Digits that is. The strange thing about living with a Digits is that other cats now look weird. When I visit someone or see another neighborhood cat, I think that their feet look wierd till I remind myself that its Digits thats the weird one. But then, in domestic cats, extra digits are a genetically dominant trait (need to do some research, I forget what type of dominant gene it is). While a single polydactyl parent can produce a litter with both normal and poly kittens, in breeding pairs where both parents are polydactyl, the kittens will almost always be poly and have more digits than their parents. Which means that the normal gene is recessive in poly cats! Of course, since the primitive land animal had somewhere in the neighborhood of 7-8 toes per limb, rather than our demure five, normal is rather relative here.
Which goes into my next recent pondering. As many of you know, I have a facination with the nature of bipedal locomotion. Its existence is rather weird, especialy in the fact that it evolved not once, not twice, but three separate times in raddically separate speices groups (roos, dinosaurs, and humans). The oddity of this is that of the three groups, humans are the only plantigrade biped which habitually walk like this. Bears are the only platigrade habitual biped which is not a primate! What does this mean? Well, for one, it means that our legs dont bend like cats or roos - we dont have an extra walking joint (the point which bends backwards on these animals leg is not a knee, its the ankle!). Our step has a much reduced lifting fulcrum on the lower end of the step (our foot from heal to ball) and a much lengthened lifting fulcrum on the top end of the step (our thighs). This is Raddically different from any other biped! Its seriously weird. It says something is radically different about the process which led to our bipedalism than any other animal's thus far. Its even different from our closest primate relatives. Just remember, Chimpanzees are unable to extend their knee-joints to produce a straight leg in the stance phase! That means they cant even stand up as we do. Yet we can see in them that the directon towards plantigrade bipedalism was already firmly set before our divergence. Yet in larger great apes which diverged earlier (orangs come to mind) the hand/foot are almost identical, and it seems that evolution could have gone either way with it.
I'm a total geek, arent I?
In other ramblings, anyone seen this weird mcdonnals commercial with Ronald dancing on a DDR pad and this generic jpop sounding music going? Every time I hear the damned thing I HAVE to put on Jpop of some sort or I feel weird afterwards. Its seriously creapy.
I've been reading alot, mainly wandering the internet and educating myself on random things. I've been learning to read chinese menue icons, and educating myself more about my favorite food, attempting to add some more japanese to my vocabulary (thus far I seem to be able to get numbers, but everything else except the endings is a mystery to me), listening to a ton of old Sherlock Holmes radio broadcasts (check under the radio section), and reading metafilter.
Speaking of metafilter, this got posted today, and I FUCKING WANT ONE. It is a small animitronic animal which interfaces with your cell phone to provide a more polite way to alert you to calls, and to interact with your phone. And it and its bunny sister are the two cutest damned things I think MIT has produced since... well since this damned thing. Really, this is why I love MIT. These people are thinking about technology not as some god, or some business, but as something which can be integrated into our daily lives and made to live with us. Already, this is the case, but so much of technology is segmented out of daily living, only to slowly be integrated into our lives generations later (the evolution of the placement of the TV in american homes comes to mind). Me, I want technology as part of my life! I live attached to a computer (note that for somewhere in the neighborhood of four years, Ive never been more than six feet away from a computer for on average longer than an hour (not counting vacation time). But I want more! I want a computer which interacts with me on a level like a very smart pet (think Navies or Persicoms) or which IS a very smart pet! I want robots which deal with yard work and vacume my floors (as soon as I live somewhere small enough, I'll have me a roomba). I want a frige which orders food I like and which has things delivered to my door before I know I'm out of them! I want a smart house which takes care of me, cleans the litter box, and hell, while I'm wishing, absorbs all my shed hair! The point is, I want to interact with my technology more than just pushing buttons and typing commands. I want to be able to teach my pet robot that I like diet coke with splenda (can you beleive I just said that!) and Jpop, and have it find both! I want my TV to be even better than TiVo - I want it to not only sugest shows and learn what I like, but to be able to have short conversations with me about the latest episode of Paranoid Agent. These things are not too much to ask, and damn it, the folks at MIT seem to be the only ones short of the Japanese which are headed in the right direction. So either I'm going to have to move to Japan (tempting...) or get the guys at the MIT media lab a marketing contract with someone.
Speaking of which... (moving to japan that is) How long do you think it would take for Square Soft (Square-Enix now, I must remind myself) to hire me or pay me a large sum of money to not camp on their doorstep in Japan wearing a moogle suit? "Hey, that crazy gaijin is back on the front steps in the moogle suit, and she has a sign that says 'Square Unfair to American Moogles' today." "Better than yesterday when she was doing the Moogle dance for three hours during lunch." "Someone go write her a check for how ever many Yen it will take to make her go away. Or better yet, ask her how much to buy the Idea and get her a contract with marketing." I wonder if it would work... *starts writing her resimoogle*
Oh yes, and in case your wondering why this long post, I'm trying to keep myself awake so that I dont fall asleep at 9am like I have the past week, and kill my sleeping schedule.
-Robert A. Heinlein
So, being jobless and not in school, I spend most of my days (er, currently nights since I seem to be sleeping in four hour shifts at the moment) thinking alot about well, everything which crosses my mind.
I live with a very cute but very polydactyl cat. I've mentioned him before, Digits that is. The strange thing about living with a Digits is that other cats now look weird. When I visit someone or see another neighborhood cat, I think that their feet look wierd till I remind myself that its Digits thats the weird one. But then, in domestic cats, extra digits are a genetically dominant trait (need to do some research, I forget what type of dominant gene it is). While a single polydactyl parent can produce a litter with both normal and poly kittens, in breeding pairs where both parents are polydactyl, the kittens will almost always be poly and have more digits than their parents. Which means that the normal gene is recessive in poly cats! Of course, since the primitive land animal had somewhere in the neighborhood of 7-8 toes per limb, rather than our demure five, normal is rather relative here.
Which goes into my next recent pondering. As many of you know, I have a facination with the nature of bipedal locomotion. Its existence is rather weird, especialy in the fact that it evolved not once, not twice, but three separate times in raddically separate speices groups (roos, dinosaurs, and humans). The oddity of this is that of the three groups, humans are the only plantigrade biped which habitually walk like this. Bears are the only platigrade habitual biped which is not a primate! What does this mean? Well, for one, it means that our legs dont bend like cats or roos - we dont have an extra walking joint (the point which bends backwards on these animals leg is not a knee, its the ankle!). Our step has a much reduced lifting fulcrum on the lower end of the step (our foot from heal to ball) and a much lengthened lifting fulcrum on the top end of the step (our thighs). This is Raddically different from any other biped! Its seriously weird. It says something is radically different about the process which led to our bipedalism than any other animal's thus far. Its even different from our closest primate relatives. Just remember, Chimpanzees are unable to extend their knee-joints to produce a straight leg in the stance phase! That means they cant even stand up as we do. Yet we can see in them that the directon towards plantigrade bipedalism was already firmly set before our divergence. Yet in larger great apes which diverged earlier (orangs come to mind) the hand/foot are almost identical, and it seems that evolution could have gone either way with it.
I'm a total geek, arent I?
In other ramblings, anyone seen this weird mcdonnals commercial with Ronald dancing on a DDR pad and this generic jpop sounding music going? Every time I hear the damned thing I HAVE to put on Jpop of some sort or I feel weird afterwards. Its seriously creapy.
I've been reading alot, mainly wandering the internet and educating myself on random things. I've been learning to read chinese menue icons, and educating myself more about my favorite food, attempting to add some more japanese to my vocabulary (thus far I seem to be able to get numbers, but everything else except the endings is a mystery to me), listening to a ton of old Sherlock Holmes radio broadcasts (check under the radio section), and reading metafilter.
Speaking of metafilter, this got posted today, and I FUCKING WANT ONE. It is a small animitronic animal which interfaces with your cell phone to provide a more polite way to alert you to calls, and to interact with your phone. And it and its bunny sister are the two cutest damned things I think MIT has produced since... well since this damned thing. Really, this is why I love MIT. These people are thinking about technology not as some god, or some business, but as something which can be integrated into our daily lives and made to live with us. Already, this is the case, but so much of technology is segmented out of daily living, only to slowly be integrated into our lives generations later (the evolution of the placement of the TV in american homes comes to mind). Me, I want technology as part of my life! I live attached to a computer (note that for somewhere in the neighborhood of four years, Ive never been more than six feet away from a computer for on average longer than an hour (not counting vacation time). But I want more! I want a computer which interacts with me on a level like a very smart pet (think Navies or Persicoms) or which IS a very smart pet! I want robots which deal with yard work and vacume my floors (as soon as I live somewhere small enough, I'll have me a roomba). I want a frige which orders food I like and which has things delivered to my door before I know I'm out of them! I want a smart house which takes care of me, cleans the litter box, and hell, while I'm wishing, absorbs all my shed hair! The point is, I want to interact with my technology more than just pushing buttons and typing commands. I want to be able to teach my pet robot that I like diet coke with splenda (can you beleive I just said that!) and Jpop, and have it find both! I want my TV to be even better than TiVo - I want it to not only sugest shows and learn what I like, but to be able to have short conversations with me about the latest episode of Paranoid Agent. These things are not too much to ask, and damn it, the folks at MIT seem to be the only ones short of the Japanese which are headed in the right direction. So either I'm going to have to move to Japan (tempting...) or get the guys at the MIT media lab a marketing contract with someone.
Speaking of which... (moving to japan that is) How long do you think it would take for Square Soft (Square-Enix now, I must remind myself) to hire me or pay me a large sum of money to not camp on their doorstep in Japan wearing a moogle suit? "Hey, that crazy gaijin is back on the front steps in the moogle suit, and she has a sign that says 'Square Unfair to American Moogles' today." "Better than yesterday when she was doing the Moogle dance for three hours during lunch." "Someone go write her a check for how ever many Yen it will take to make her go away. Or better yet, ask her how much to buy the Idea and get her a contract with marketing." I wonder if it would work... *starts writing her resimoogle*
Oh yes, and in case your wondering why this long post, I'm trying to keep myself awake so that I dont fall asleep at 9am like I have the past week, and kill my sleeping schedule.
