Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"If you ever had a reason to wonder what the difference between conservative and liberal thinking is, the later is the school that would never think to compile a list of dangerous books." -- re6smith, 2005-06-01

this feels odd. i have half-awoken, but not in the usual sense. my right side is awake, but my left arm, leg, buttock, and side of my back are just ... meat. well not quite -- my arm has proprioception and skin sensation; my leg lacks proprioception and doesn't feel light touch (but did feel perrine walk on it). it feels like ordinary sleep-paralysis just failed to releease that side of my body when my eyes opened. i'm sure that in a few minutes either my left side will wake or the rest of me will fall back asleep. i don't know why i woke up at all so soon after falling asleep in the first place, but i have been having trouble staying asleep long enough lately.

the human nervous system is a source of endless fascination.

[Edit: sometime before 07:45 my left side woke up, though it felt a little weak the first few minutes. I still haven't gotten enough sleep for the night. I'll try to go back to sleep normally soon, and see whether I can get a couple more hours of shuteye.]

• Hufu, tofu textured and flavored to resemble human flesh, "the healthy human flesh alternative". "Society is always flirting with the consumption of human flesh: true-crime novels, The Silence of the Lambs film series, zombie flicks, survival epics, even sit-coms. Pop culture loves a good cannibal. Now, thanks to Mark Nuckols, cannibalism has finally made it to the American dinner table." The company web site includes recipes. (Thanks to dfn_doe for the link.)
  


• Look up unfamiliar idioms at WhatDoesThatMean?: "This site is a free lexicon of English idioms, words, and catch phrases from around the world. This is also a 'user built' site - in addition to searching for a definition, you can add your own. Indeed, we encourage you to do so!"
  


• Fantasy Bedtime Hour, a local-access cable show in San Fransisco that consists of two naked women in bed reading and discussing the novel Lord Foul's Bane, with guest appearances by experts who attempt to answer some of their questions about the book. Stephen R. Donaldson, the author of the novel, likes the show. I think I'd like to see this. (Thanks to merde for linking to it.)
  


• A funny tale of a distractable person and their encounter with local fauna
  


• The vampire squid from hell -- really, Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Click through to see why the discoverer named it that. Asid from the cool/creepy appearance (and no, merely being a cephalopod is not enough to qualify it as creepy-looking in my book) it sounds like a rather fascinating creature: "The vampire is a phylogenetic relict and possesses features of both octopods and decapods. In addition, it has many features that are probably adaptations to the deep-sea environment. Among these are the loss of the ink sac and most active chromatophores, development of photophores and the gelatinous consistency of the tissues." You could even say it glows (I'll leave the implied filk to someone else to flesh out): "[...] The photophores all glow simultaneously or they all can flash at a rate of one to three per second or pulsate. With the arm-tip organs apparently glowing continuously, the vampire moves the arms round rapidly exposing and hiding the photophores which is '...very disorienting [to an observer] when trying to visually fix the animal's position'. Often a flash of the arm tips is followed by a rapid escape response." (Thanks to qmarq -- it's his favourite deep-sea squid -- for the link.)
  


• This got passed around a bit a week or two ago, but a few of you might not have seen the warning from Canada describing the social upheaval caused by the legalization of same-sex marriage north of the border. What's in store for us if we follow suit? "Since then, the social fabric of Canada has been torn apart. Every single person in Toronto, our largest city, is participating in a massive gay orgy. They've already ran out of batteries, chocolate (twice) and whipped cream (they sent the Blue Jays to Chicago to get more - you don't have to give them back). 101% of our marriages have broken down. We have been hit with no less then 15 Biblical plauges. I only thought there were 10 myself - but that one with chili cheese dogs is really nasty. And Richard Simmons - who knew? Rabid moose are roaming the streets, trying to violate people with antlers. [...]" The mainstream media have been curiously silent regarding this distressing state of affairs.
  


• The Dark Side of Love (as explained by Lucifer), an unusual interpretation of The Fall, the nature of God and of love, and of Hell. It includes lovely quotable bits, but the one that wouldn't be a spoiler also doesn't convey why you'll want to read it, so I'll save the quotes for my QotD queue sometime after most of y'all will have already read this. I don't agree with the theology/philosophy, but it does raise some interesting (a bit disturbing) thoughts, makes some, "gee I never thought of it that way" points, and is very nicely written.
  


• "So Much Drama in the PhD", a techie rap song with such lines as:

  Blowin' up the rap scene faster than factorial functions,
  I'm dope like PNP transistors and I'll saturate your junctions.
  By the time you've rhymed one line, I've already busted ten;
  You rap in exponential time and I'm big-O of log(n).

  I haven't listened to the MP3 yet. And that seems like a good lead in to this next item ...
  


• I'm guessing that madbodger will be pleased by news of ribbon-beam vacuum tubes, which may solve some problems facing the wireless communication explosion because "A ribbon-beam vacuum electron device requires less energy than either conventional vacuum electron devices or the solid-state transistors that replaced them in many applications decades ago." Vacuum tubes (or, if you prefer, 'valves') that beat transistors for power consumption? Gimme a little while to adjust my worldview ... "Ribbon beam amplifiers (RBAs) are smaller, generate less heat, require smaller backup batteries, are more electrically efficient and cost thousands of dollars less than solid-state amplifiers. And because they could be mounted directly on a base-station tower, less signal decay would occur during transmission." They're predicting this could have a major impact on the growth of next-generation wireless networks. "[...] dramatically improving throughput and reducing the cost of base stations by 65 percent [...] reduce the cost of delivering voice and data from the current 50 cents per megabyte to five cents per megabyte [...] from 1.9 GHz for third-generation U.S. wireless base stations to 5.8 GHz for WiMAX, or wireless broadband networks [...]" It'll be interesting to see how this works out.
  


• A scientific analysis of the effects of orgasm on women's brains, using modern brain-imaging technology (the article just says "brain scans" without specifying which technique): "You see extreme deactivation of large portions of the brain, especially the fear centres, the brain that controls emotions." and: "The deactivation of these very important parts of the brain might be the most important thing necessary to have an orgasm. If you are in a high level of anxiety it is very hard to have sex." The scientists attempted to study men's brains the same way but were presented with challenges because "it typically took only 20 seconds to reach ejaculation" which made it difficult to interpret the data. They suspect some similarities between the sexes but have already noted some differences. [Edit at 13:45: Here are two more articles about the same study (thanks to moominmolly).]

I heard scuffling noises, then a short time later Perrine dashed into the bedroom moving as though she was in a hurry. A closer look revealed exactly what I expected to find: a mouse in her jaws. A baby (well, a juvenile anyhow) this time. With cute, disproportionately-large ears, that baby-mammal look to its face, and a not-quite-sure-of-itself walk. As somebody's pet, it'd be cute. Scampering around my bed or my kitchen, not so cute. As soon as Perrine dropped it, it hid under her. Hid successfully right under my cat. (Okay, we know that Perrine does not have eyes in her butt, counter to theories about how cats read.) While she was still uncertain where it had gone, I was able to nudge her aside and scoop the mouse into a plastic container.

So now it's hopping around in a clear plastic peanut butter jar (and pooping a lot) while Perrine watches, fascinated, and tries to figure out how to get at it, occasionally poking at the jar or nudging it. She's unhappy about not being able to reach it (she just gave a little cry of frustration) but I'm happy that the mouselet isn't pooping in my bed or making its way to a cranny where Perrine would lose track of it entirely and it would escape to survive to adulthood. I'm telling myself that trapping it in the jar is less cruel than Perrine would be to it if she could reach it. When it looks like it's running out of air, I'll toss it outside or pick a quicker way to kill it. For now, it's cat-entertainment.

At least this time I was already awake.

I've got one bedroom that Perrine isn't supposed to enter (which, of course, makes her want very much to go in there), though I'm considering changing that policy. The idea was to have a room to which I could retreat if my cat-allergy was being bad, with side effects of having a room where stored clothes are less likely to gather cat fur, and where allergic guests can hide out. (I seem to be doing pretty well regarding my allergy to cats, at least when it comes to Perrine, and that room isn't sufficiently isolated from the rest of the house to be enough of a retreat for guests who are significantly more allergic than I am. But the clothing issue remains ...) Anyhow, that's the blue room, and it has an air conditioner in it.

The window in the green bedroom is painted shut, so no AC here, but it does have the colour television and a working computer and is where I can spend time with my darling cat. But sometimes I have to hide out in the blue room just to cool off, leaving poor Perrine out in the hall all night. (She could go up to the third floor, which is where the other air conditioners are, but if I'm home, she mostly sleeps on whichever floor of the house I'm on -- though on hot nights she won't stay in the bed even if I'm in the green room, and looks a bit warm even in the slightly-cooler hallway.)

In the interest of getting a little more cool air into the green room, I opened the door to the blue room and wedged a largeish window screen in the doorway. I was interested in seeing whether that would keep Perrine out.

Oddly enough, it does so far. She eyed it very thoroughly, and I'm pretty sure she could leap over it (I'm not sure whether she's as certain though -- she leaps onto things that are higher than that, but I haven't seen her jump over something that high), and she's definitely shown her usual curiosity about that room, but she also noticed that I was watching her and seems to have decided to accept that whether she could jump over or not, the screen means she's not supposed to. So she'll try to run past me into the room when I go in or out, but won't jump over the screen even when I'm asleep. Interesting.

I'm not sure how long this will last, mind you, and I don't trust her to remain so obedient if I leave the screen there when I leave the house, but for now, I've got airflow without having her exploring the blue room. And an interesting little experiment in feline psychology.

(Of course, increased airflow also means more of her fur and dander drifting into that room even if she doesn't wander around in there ... some was getting in under the door -- the gap is more than a paw-width -- but this will surely increase it. And if I do decide to rescind the off-limits status of that room the whole issue of the door and the screen goes away. For now, a compromise situation until I decide otherwise.)

Finally got a little nap to partially correct for not having slept enough this morning, but I'm still not moving at full speed. Getting ready for 3LF rehearsal now, but am likely to get there a bit late.