Daily Record of the Most Boringest Life on Earth

King County Courthouse is located between 3rd and 4th streets in Downtown Seattle.   The two streets run tangent to the steep slope that separates them–consequently the courthouse entrance on 3rd street is a full floor below its exit on 4th.  If you’ve been to the downtown branch of Seattle public library, you should know what I mean.

This afternoon I attended a hearing at the courthouse.  Short and ending in my favor, my lawyers and I exited the hearing in good spirits.   We took the elevator to the familiar STAR-1 floor with intent to exit the building.  When the elevator door opened an attractive woman walked past in the direction opposite of our usual exit.  I remembered this lady from my previous court session months ago; she was an attorney for another case.  Captivated, I decided to follow her through the building to the 4th street exit–it was in the direction of my parked car after all.  I rationalized that cutting though the building’s interior should save me the effort of walking around its exterior.

Trying not to be obvious (or too creepy), I followed at some distance hoping to be inconspicuous.  I studied her curves as she swaggered down the doorless, fluorescently-lit corridor in front of me.  Elevators and a security station awaited us at the end.  I nodded to the guard as I cued an elevator to take us to ground level.

In the elevator, on reaching STAR-1, she turned toward me and spoke:  “Ugh.  It’s been a long day… Are you familiar with this building at all?”

Smiling, I replied: “No, not really.”

“There is supposed to be a Department of Licensing on one of the floors above.”

“Um,  I know there is a DMV in the building across the street.”

She smiled back at me, seemingly amused, and warmly told me to have a nice day.

When I finally made it outside, I found myself on the other side of 4th street–I had exited from the very building to which I had directed her.  The long corridor through which I followed must have been a tunnel underneath 4th street.  Nothing like revealing both my California nativity and complete disorientation in one brief statement.  In hindsight, I am grateful that she didn’t laugh (at me) out loud.

 

MySpace removed all RSS feeds from blog pages.  They also designed their pages to only display 10 posts at a time.  These subtle and strategic measures prevent application-mediated transfer of blog posts and comments to other hosts (e.g. WordPress).  That is, I could not transfer my posts from MySpace in 10 minutes the way I could from Blogger.  Instead I had to tediously cut-and-paste the HTML of each post into WordPress one at a time–a chore that cost me at least 30 hours.  And, I still have to figure out how to move comments…

I’ve got to hand it to MySpace:  despite publishing arguably one of the worst-designed and badly-coded websites on the interwebs, removing RSS feeds from their blogs was a surprisingly cunning (and predictably proprietary) move on their part.  I didn’t think they had it in them.

I am in the process of consolidating my two, somewhat parallel, blogs into this new one. Links to my earlier blogs–ones that actually contain material–are:  blogger, MySpace.

Should have this one up soon…

I have completely ignored blogging for more than a year. I’ve ignored this site for several years. Blogging was one of my few healthy activities during my drinking days. My posting became less frequent the more I nurtured my resentments. These days, my only check-ins are one sentence, third person status updates on Facebook.

Years from now, when I find this post, I’ll remember how I poured three months of my life into this project. It diverted me a bit from my thesis work. Some insist it was a waste of my time. Lazy and short-sighted they are though. I thrive on the challenge of solving problems; it is how I learn. And my appetite for learning seems only to grow as I grow older.

 

Double pendulum with ball & socket joints

 

Project keywords: rigid-body dynamics, explicit constraints, implicit constraints, constraint stabilization, Jacobian, inertia matrix, rotation matrices, singularities, non-invertible, quaternion rotation, dynamical system, 4th-order Runge-Kutta solver.

My maternal grandmother passed away last week. I am sad. She was a person who lit up each and every person she met, throughout all of her life. The world is less in her absence.

“Steely Dan does not accept friend requests from bands.”

Fuckers.

Between bars, I found myself driving three of my friend’s friends the other night.

They dug out from the backseat crack, a long-forgotten VHS cassette entitled “Prenatal Yoga with Shiva Rea”.  The cover sported a nicely-toned angelic female complete with third-trimester belly.

They laughed and laughed.  I exclaimed: “Hey at least it’s not porn.”

“Well it kind of is…” retorted one.

Only a handful of laboratories in the world are masochistic enough to do research in motor neurophysiology. The majority of the scientists that comprise the field reside in foreign countries (as Americentric as that sounds). When these foreigners visit (or join) our lab, I often have to explain the nuances of American “culture” (without cynicism I should add).

The other day, I found myself sending this…

Anything to help out a fellow labmate in distress.

Undergrad no. 1: “Wonder what happens if you press that button?”

Undergrad no. 2: “Maybe the bus undergoes spontaneous combustion…”

Undergrad no. 3: “Maybe it instantly folds up into a suitcase…”

Undergrad no. 2: “Maybe it starts thermonuclear war.”

Undergrad no. 1: “He he.  Hey what’s the difference between thermonuclear war and plain old nuclear war?”

Undergrad no. 3: “Well, “thermo” means like temperature doesn’t it?”

Undergrad no. 2: “…all I remember is that they talked about global thermonuclear war in that old movie War Games.”

Undergrad no. 1: “Isn’t that the one where they teach chimps to fly planes…?”

Undergrad no. 2: “No, that’s Project X.  War Games is the one where Matthew Broderick fries the military super-computer by having it play tic-tac-toe against itself.”

Undergrad no. 1: “Yeah, but you still haven’t explained what thermonuclear war is…”

Me: “Regular-ass nuclear war is when weak-ass fission bombs are involved, you know, like the ones we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.  Thermonuclear war involves Hydrogen (or fusion) bombs.  These are several orders of magnitude more powerful than your garden-variety fission bomb.  In fact, H-bombs require fission bombs to detonate.”

Undergrads nos. 1, 2 and 3 look back at me with contemptuous faces.  They remain silent  for the next five blocks before my stop. 

Me:  “If you don’t want your ignorance rectified, next time maybe keep your conversation to yourselves.”