I have ringworm. It is athletes foot, not on your foot. 20% of the world’s population has it at any given time. I know at least a half dozen people who got it because of interactions with a feral kitten. I caught it early and only have one ring-shaped sore on the back of my [...]
I was sick a lot in K-12 and missed at least a full year in total. Home sick I would watch read books and watch television. Luckily I happened to have this opportunity when the History Channel didn’t suck or otherwise I would be a complete idiot. This new “mainstream” History Channel is not full [...]
I am currently watching two kittens: a grey persian (Lucy) and a black and white long-hair (Nana), as seen above. Below is an old picture of me and my sister with the two cats we had while growing up, Spunky and Moxie (left to right).
China is acting all tough about Google pulling out (new school) and saying that they can’t. Well, they did. Google beat China. My disappointment with China comes from the current generation of post-Mao deciding be spoon-fed economic revolution for political revolution. To me it is like a genie granting you a wish. You should ask [...]
Ant hills are no different than shopping malls, except for our ego-driven perception.
This project is possibly my favorite internet project ever. It is a Rube Goldberg-esque machine that uses my favorite microcontroller, the Parallax propeller. It is a Turing machine that uses 1000 feet of dry-erase comaptible 35mm film to store a series of literal “1″ and “0″ drawn by an automated marker. The construction is amazing. [...]
A big problem I have with the healthcare bill is that it prevents any state from setting up a canada/UK/communist system. Healthcare reform is a bailout to an industry that is not failing, but making record profits. The medical-industrial complex is more of a threat than the military-industrial complex. The supreme court decision to allow [...]
Delay Line Memory is was computers used back in the vacuum tubes as short-term memory. Today you can buy memory dirt cheap ($10/GB), but back in the day they used a time delay system with large sets of mercury filled tubes that used sound waves to store information. When the wave echoes back, it is [...]
150 is a magic number, also called Dunbar’s number, because it is supposedly the largest number of social connections we can understand. Some simple math tells us this is 150!/(2!*(150-2)! = 11,175 different connections we are able to keep track of. This is an upper limit, and realistically you know far fewer actual people. Yes, [...]
45,000 people per year die in the United States from a lack of health coverage. What would we spend to prevent 45,000 deaths per year from terrorism?
when there’s none left
Tonight the KAUST movie theater is opening up. This will be the only movie theater/film theatre in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know yet what they will be showing (really doubt it will be the Kingdom). It will be nice having the cinema that sits prominently across the square across from my apartment finally open. Tickets [...]
House cats are the biggest cats that usually can’t kill you.
If you are a real patriot, you burn the New York Times because communist propaganda makes paper burn better. Before you dump the yellowed sheets into the fire, pull these guys out because they are well worth reading. David Brooks takes on who Obama really is. He was on Colbert recently. Building a Better Teacher. [...]
I drew this freehand over the course of several courses from witch this was the most relevant information I could plunder during my first semester at KAUST during the eighteenth year of my formal education. I think they (who I don’t know) stop labeling grades with numbers because otherwise grade 20-25 (PhD) seems very imposing. [...]