Author: Rory

Two major developments last week:

I got lasik surgery on Tuesday, allowing me to see reasonably well for the first time in 13 years or so. By “reasonably well” I mean well enough to fly a plane. As I understand it, visual acuity is the only relevant qualification for flying a plane, so see you in the skies soon.

On Friday I reached the end of my apartment search and signed a contract for a one year lease in a cool place about 200m from my office. The walk from my bed to my desk is under 1000 paces, and that’s if I take the stairs. I moved in on Saturday.

The xenomorph–antagonist of the Alien film series–has a complex lifecycle. After hatching from an egg, the “facehugger” attaches itself to a host organism and implants an embryo deep within its body. Having done so, it seemingly dies. In reality, though, the creature lives on, gestating, advancing toward its next stage. Sometime later the parasite violently emerges from its carrier, then rapidly grows to enormous–and lethal–size, a near-perfect killing machine.

This reminds me of nothing so much as Dick Cheney.

Alien Nation–DefectiveYeti.com

Children are not idiots. Okay, most of them are idiots. Nevertheless, children still deserve our respect. Okay, they don’t deserve any respect. But even so, I would not wish the Fantastic 4 Human Torch™ ATV (with Light-Up Headlights!) toy on my worst child enemy–and, believe me, I have many. Why?

The article goes on to describe why, with much ranting.

This video takes a minute to get going properly, but it’s worth checking out if you have a few minutes to kill.

I’ve made change to the Heather McNeil bet. If you’ve helped me so far, or still want to help me, please have a look at the update at the top of that post. I’ve moved the picture, so you may need to update your own blog post.

This is the last change, I promise.

Thanks.

Important update!—I’m not so keen on having the picture I’m using hosted by Flickr. In fact I don’t even know if Flickr photos show up in GIS results. So I’ve switched to a copy of the picture hosted on Soylent Red. If you’ve helped with the campaign so far I’d really appreciate it if you could update your sites to point at the new image. Links to this post and to the blog are still fine.

And so it came to pass that Heather McNeil bet me that I couldn’t get a picture of her to show up in the top 10 results for a Google Image Search for “Heather McNeil”. I have until the weekend of 8^th/9^th September to make this happen. If I fail, I face a forfeit. According to Rachel, who had a hand in deciding the forfeit, I really should try to win.

Step 1: I have found the image I want to promote:

(Heather McNeil at K4)

It’s from K4, and I chose it because it was the first one I found. I wanted to crack on with the game* rather than faffing about trying to find a really embarrassing one. I also think that going a little easy on the embarrassing front could be a good idea if it turns out that I lose the bet.

Step 2: Google likes your search terms to appear in the address. http://heathermcneil.blogspot.com/, the blog I set up today solely for the purpose of winning this bet, should help in that regard.

Step 3: This site has a pretty high Page Rank for many pages, so a mention or two on here should be a big win for me.

Step 4: Your help! Please post the picture wherever you can, or link to it wherever you can. Don’t copy the picture; that’s no use. Just use the address “http://www.soylentred.net/images/heather-mcneil.jpg”. Be sure to put Heather’s full name (Heather McNeil) prominently close to the picture. Alt and title text is ideal, if you know what those are.

It’s also useful if you can link to this post or to the blog wherever you can.

Step 5: There is no step 5.

Step 6: Victory!

* (I just lost, by the way. The other game I mean.)

In less than four weeks I will no longer need to wear glasses. This afternoon, during lunch, I booked LASIK surgery for Tuesday, 3 July. I don’t think a person who doesn’t wear glasses will understand the significance of this no matter how much I try to describe it, and I don’t think a person who does wear them needs any prompting to understand how I feel about them.

In a way I’m being harsh. Glasses are the only means by which I’ve been able to see at any level of quality good enough to effectively live my life for the last 12 years. But they’re symbolic. Symbolic of a disability so prevalent, and thankfully so well treated, that most people never come to see it as one.

I’m just thankful that I’m in a position to fix the problem properly and will no longer have to rely on that ugly hack of a workaround.

As an atheist I’m a proud follower of the noble tradition of making up your own feast days for your convenience, just as those wacky religious people have done before us. I mean that’s one thing we can all appreciate from religion, right? Taking a day off for no reason. I’m all in with that.

So it’s with that in mind that I want to wish you, all the sad dregs devoted stalwarts of the remainder of this blog’s once promising readership, a happy Feast of Maximum Occupancy.

From Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking (pdf):

For large P , the three-form fluxes are dilute, and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti-D3 to embiggen is very mild.

(Emphasis mine.)