Sleep no more.

Bleah. Had a lousy sleep last night. First I couldn't fall asleep at all. It was probably past 6:30 am when I finally fell asleep, and then I had a bad dream. It wasn't a nightmare, but it wasn't fun either. So I woke up feeling pretty grumpy. taxlady hugged me and stroked my head and brought me coffee and asked if there was anything else she could do to make things better.  Just having someone who loves me helps a lot. Now I will read comics and hope that that cheers me up further.

Two Lumps.

I mentioned TWO LUMPS once before, but I do enjoy the comic, so I thought I would post a link (or two) to it:



Just one of the things that helps to cheer me up sometimes.

Warm to Solidify, Cool to Melt.

And NO, I'm not referring to any part of my body in the above title, but to a new chemical compound that is a liquid at room temperature, but solidifies when heated to between 45°C and 75°C. This is not unheard of (eggwhites do that) but this is the first compound discovered that completely reverses the process and reverts back to its initial liquid state whenever the temperature drops back below 45°C. Since this compound was discovered a whole host of others with similar structures have been found, so its looking like we'll hear lots of good things about this.

My question is, what are we gonna use this new class of compounds for? It seems obvious that they should have thousands of uses, but the only ones I can think of are governor-type applications where (for example) a rotating axle is slowed when the heat from its rotation goes above a critical temperature. That smacks of poor imagination on my part. What other uses can we think of?

New Phrases to Introduce.

I came up with a catchy new phrase three weeks ago, but have yet to find a good way to insert it into a conversation. So, I've decided to release it into the wild here, and see where it goes. Feel free to link back here as the source of the phrase, as I'm somewhat curious to see if it catches on, or dies a horrible death. (Okay, so I'm just too bored and bummed out to do any real work at this particular moment.)  I did a quick search on Google, and found zero instances of the phrase, so I think its original to me.

Now, for a while I regretted coining the "Its all Monkey!" catch phrase that became common among a certain circle of my friends, but who says we have to learn from our mistakes anyway?  So, without any further ado we have:

Whatever Gropes your Pope

This is obviously a varient on "Whatever floats your boat", and is used in situations where one does not want to appear judgemental:

Person 1: I like to smear mustard in my hair! Its soooo Coooool!!!
Person 2: Like, whatever gropes your pope man!

I stand corrected: Alien Faces.

At a garden party at denizsarikaya's place a few parties back, I was talking with some folks about the problems inherent in doing non-human aliens for movies and TV. What I like to think of as the 'face' problem. Alien aliens are going to have completely different ways of displaying emotions than we do.

Can you tell when a shark is happy or sad? They do convey emotional states via body posture, but humans have to learn the signals the hard way. We just aren't wired to interpret things the way that sharks display them. Most people can't figure out what signals a bear is giving, although they use almost the identical set that dogs use. (Then again, I know lots of folks who have trouble interpreting dog body language).

I pointed out that all of the 'aliens' on farscape have humanoid faces and use humanoid facial expressions to convey emotion. My opinion at the time was that you could not do a movie with truely alien aliens as protagonists, because no one would be able to identify with them. I've now changed that opinion.

I just read an article on the trouble people had making R2D2 into a protagonist in the first Star Wars movie. They had to have a faceless robot convey emotions, and they mostly succeeded. Now, one can argue that a human-built robot is going to be designed to push the right emotional buttons in humans, and so is an easier case than a true alien, but I don't think the Star Wars folks were thinking that. They put a trash can on legs, and then told the prop people to make it display emotions. All that was available were gross body movements (turning, shaking), the twitching of an optic sensor, and electronic beeps, but they managed to convey the right messages with the wrong tools.

That made me think that maybe there IS something that could be done for a bio-hard SF movie. ('Hard' in the biological/sociological/neurological sciences as well as the physics ones). If one assumes that the whole body-posture/facial-expression thing is a known problem in the SF setting then one may be forced to take classes in biological  and cultural relatavism before being allowed to interact with aliens. Part of the training is to desensitize you to certain wrong clues that you will get from aliens, partly to learn how to 'broadcast' your emotional states in ways that alien hardwiring is meant to pick up, and partly to learn to interpret alien attempts to signal their states to us.

Thus, humans in the show may walk around with forehead color-patches that work as mood rings to help color-shifting aliens interpret our body language. Humans may also have to perform certain odd arm or hand gestures to mimic antennae gestures used by insectoids to convey feelings. By the same token, some aliens will emit mood-music to indicate their states, while others may actually wear little animorphic smileys that change in set ways to indicate emotion in an otherwise inscrutable being.

It would be a lot of hard work to make it all convincing, but it might be a bunch of fun as well!

Non-Profit Pharmaceutical companies?

Here's a nifty article about a non-profit drug company. Its goal is to find drugs that have been developed in the US which have the potential to cure diseases not found in the US, and which haven't been tested or marketted for that very reason. They test the drugs and try to bring them to disadvantaged peoples for as little as possible.

Teledildonics.

There are multiple companies out there selling internet-enabled sex toys, and Sinulator is just one of them, but I was intrigued by them after I read this review of one of their products. Clearly, the USB Monkey Fucker is just around the corner!