Hey, you know.what?

To hell with it.

Root engineering

When you need to cross a river, you have a few options (other than just saying "to hell with it" and swimming across, which isn't always viable). You can walk along the bank and try to find a sandbar or a fallen log to walk across. You can build a bridge yourself out of stone or wood. Maybe even metal, if you're 1337 enough.

Or you can grow a bridge.

After the initial "holy shit this is amazing" wears off, though, the idea goes straight to the "awesome but impractical" folder. It's not really a feasible model for civil engineering; the bridges take 10-15 years to grow and are mainly designed to accommodate foot traffic. Even if the roots could support a wider path, the stress of vehicle traffic combined with people in urban environments being dickheads and breaking things would probably destroy the bridge's integrity in a short amount of time (car crashes won't help either). The inherent impossibility of standardization/specification in the production of such a structure means that nobody would have any way of knowing what the hell was up - until it came down, with great force and possibly on top of someone. Oh, and ficus elastica can't grow everywhere. :<

I have this urge to do a NaNoWriMo.

It will be about Smithy. That much I know.

"籰", "靐", "䨻", "鱻"

What kind of person would make this a character in a writing system? 䨻 (which represents the sound of thunder and other loud sounds in 52 strokes) is so insanely complicated my Unicode font doesn't even try to render it. But it does have a meaning. Now "龘", there's something I don't ever see myself using. How often does the appearance of a walking dragon come up in conversation? Or ever, for that matter? And it has 48 strokes. Of course, the first impression is "HOT DAMN THAT'S A LOT OF STROKES". But then again,

APPEARANCE OF A WALKING DRAGON
(3+3+3+4+3+4+3+3+2+4)+(3+3)+(3)+(4+3+2+3+1+3+3)+(3+4+3+3+3+3)
79 strokes

Huh. Didn't see that coming.
(Not that 龘 works any better, though. With that amount of work you'd probably be better off drawing an actual dragon with an arrow pointing to its legs.)

Water is scary.

It's chaotic. It represents things nobody can control. The swirls in a single cup of water produce patterns and currents completely beyond the capacity of any simulation. Of course, besides that, there are the myriad properties of water which confuse and amaze the shit out of everyone who attempts to define them. While mostly explainable, it's still trippy as hell and water remains a plucky beast.

Aside from the substance itself, water covers a vast amount of the planet. But it's not the surface area that's scary, it's the volume. Oceans are deep. Lakes are deep. You don't think of land being deep, because (most of the time) you can't simply sink into the ground, or look down into it and see for miles. With water, you can. Anything deeper than five feet is mostly inaccessible to unassisted humans - pretty much any large body of water can be guaranteed to be deeper than that. Anything over 5 feet requires a vessel to cross, and if the vessel fails far enough from land, you die. This is somewhat jarring.

But it's still huge. The ocean is huge. Nobody's been to the bottom of most of it, nobody's seen most of it, and it stretches for thousands of miles.

Water is the one thing nobody controls.

World, I am disappoint.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/133827.html
http://www.transcosmic.com/2009/07/02/myspace-now-a-%E2%80%9Cdigital-ghetto%E2%80%9D/
http://www.cracked.com/video_17551_stuff-talks-most-terrifying-comedy-premise-ever.html
http://techgeist.net/2009/06/man-charged-for-virtual-pornography-harmed-no-one/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/01/richard-posner-copyright-linking-newspapers
http://jolt.unc.edu/blog/2008/09/19/internet-anonymity-right-past
http://i39.tinypic.com/rau9tx.jpg
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s909/text
http://afterhoursfriends.com/?p=3730
http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/49706087.html
http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/07/03/%E2%80%98i%E2%80%99m-an-atheist-get-me-outta-here%E2%80%99/
http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/07/03/let%E2%80%99s-have-an-age-of-consent-for-religion/
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/03/compuserve-shuts-dow.html
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/03/craigslist.girl/index.html
http://www.palibandaily.com/2009/07/09/ireland-makes-blasphemy-illegal/
http://gothamist.com/2009/07/09/arrested_pug_owner_fired_over_anti-.php

I can see forever.

But do I really want to?
It's always been assumed that more information is better. The right information, in the right place, creates better understanding of a subject and gives it depth. But the right information isn't always in the right place. The Internet is a great example of this. If you look up "trains" you'll find a crapload of things. But this is a huge, disparate web of information. There are several dozen encyclopedia entries, several hundred news articles, and several thousand sites focused on trains in some way. Nobody is categorizing this. Nobody ever could. Of course, we have some nice sites that give a good overview of what trains are all about, but these don't even break the surface as far as total knowledge.
Those who talk about the Internet being a wealth of information tend to do so in a way that implies centralization. Sites about this go here, sites about that go there. There's a directory of all the sites here, and they're all reviewed. This might be a bit quaint for today's Internet user, but the old concept of link-filled pages and web circles persists. We have blogrolls and tag clouds and "suggested links" and all that Web 2.0 crap which is essentially a rehashing of what we've had all along. It might be more advanced, and there's a lot to be said for pinpointing exactly what you're looking for, but you also have to take in consideration what that is. Knowledge on a single topic can be so broad in nature that you can't put it in a search engine or a blog tag. It encapsulates all kinds of abstract concepts and layers of understanding, and that tends to get neglected more often. Your average textbook (let's say Biology: Sixth Edition, Campbell and Reece) will cover a lot of subjects in not a lot of time. The 'facts' are right there and all you have to do is learn what they all are - they've fallen from the sky into the textbook and that's all there is to it. This is really easy to teach/learn/believe, because it doesn't require much effort. You can put divergent evolution and adenosine triphosphate on a standardized test and get a quantified result of "how much you know". But this tends to be crap, for various reasons. Even if something's true, the fact itself is almost trivial in a complete understanding of the matter. Knowing that a sinusoidal wave can be modified by changing various shit around in the equation is great, but it also helps to know why. This can't really be explained or demonstrated - you can look at the formulae all day and still not get it (or, conversely, get it but not know any of the formulae). There's no real way to tell if someone "gets it", or to what degree; therefore, this is more than a bit useless in the traditional concept of learning.
But concepts aside, the Biology textbook is not a definitive volume. It can tell me about what mitochondria do, it can tell me about phospholipid bilayers, but this is being done elsewhere. There are dozens of textbooks that can tell me all these things, hundreds of reference books that can tell me a couple of these things, and thousands of research papers that explain how one aspect of them was discovered. A textbook is a nice place to start, sometimes. But the sheer amount of information makes even finding one a daunting task. And there's no way to centralize it.
The image at the top of this post is a spatially arranged map of the Internet. Actually, part of it. Less than thirty percent of reachable Class C networks in 2005. And it's massive. It's a snowflake of message boards, academic papers, blog posts, porn, encyclopedia articles, IRC logs, pictures, directories, more porn, advertisements and directories. There's no center. There are nodes, sure - but they lead to more nodes, and soon you're nowhere near where you started. Navigating the sea of information is just as important as possessing it.

Life is a lot simpler when you operate under the assumption that everything is part of some massive farce.

And then Isaac Asimov was an awesome.

Borfle the flombabulous weskersnitches with a pirchulian slendocity.

(Sounds nice, doesn't it?)

What the hell, Indiana? That's just...

What is this I don't even

At a near-total loss for things to do this weekend, I decided I'd do the same crap I always did when I was bored - roam the Internet in a half-assed search for something interesting. Lo and behold, I managed to find what I was looking for, in a sense. Sturgeon's Law forbade me from having too much of a good time, but I managed to get by.

Since I haven't made many internet-related posts in a while, I decided I'd eschew the usual Cartesian ravings today, in lieu of shameless lipservice to other blogs and websites.

One of the more interesting sites I've been reading lately is Mentally Incontinent. Although I'm saving most of the stories for a rainy (i.e. connection-less) day, the ones I read ("The Wal-Mart Story" and "My Top 5 Worst Birthdays" standing out as some of the best) were pretty groovy.

Broken Picture Telephone has been around for a while now, and I haven't been on in about a month but I still think it deserves mention. The basic premise of the game is that you're given a description of a scene, which you then have to draw on a small canvas using limited tools. Another player is then given your drawing, and gives it a short description - this continues for a while, each player unaware of all but the most recent iteration of the canvas, until something entirely unrelated to the first description appears. And between the people who draw genitalia for every description, the people who think everything looks like a Pac-Man ghost, and the ones who are actually trying, some amount of fun can be had.

The imageboards, for the most part, are primarily drivel and screed (and not the GOOD kind of drivel and screed); a couple sites, whose names will not be mentioned, are doing pretty well for themselves but they're fighting an uphill battle. Post quality has degraded almost everywhere, some places slower than others, and things like this don't tend to fix themselves. Nothing really of value has been lost, though.

IRC remains mostly idiot-free - the amount of effort and technical skill required to set up a client, connect to a server, and join a channels is a bit more than some people have. Which, of course, includes morons, but it also includes everyone who can't be arsed to spend two hours figuring out how to use the application. But it's an open protocol, so that's always nice.

Oh, yeah, and Haruhi season 2, just in case you've been in a coma for the last month.

Anyway, I'm going to finish off today's post with a particularly interesting narrative by the name of "Shitty Roommate", by Martin Random. What starts out as a guy talking about his jackass roommate soon turns into a bizarre first-hand account of what Random describes as "storming the evil castle of count von feces". I don't think I can do any better than that at explaining the rest of the piece, so I'll just give a representative quote and particularly interesting passage - you'll have to read the rest for yourself.

"Have you ever had something go wrong, and, knowing it was someone elses responsibility, just didn't intervene out of sheer curiousity about how it fucking bad it would get?"

...It was dubbed the "Home Alone" security system. I had two potential entrances to my private area, a sliding glass patio door and a regular door to the common area. I secured the common door with a padlock on the outside which was really just for show. The inside was barricaded. At the bottom I had a rolled up towel, and I sealed the rest of it with tape to avoid smell or other chemical assaults from the common area. I packed against the door with my king-sized bed, which was in turn secured from being dislodged by a bookshelf full of weights and books. Even if he got through the padlock, he would not have been able to open the door without busting it in two. The top half of the door was unsecured; I was worried he might break the door and gain access, so when I siezed his stuff I had it put in public storage across town. Now the sliding glass door is where the Home Alone shit comes in. It had a lock, but it was nonfunctional and only accessible from the inside. So in order to secure the door while I was away, I got a remote controlled car, attached it to a string which was secured by a fisheye screw at the top of the door, and tied to a security bar which would drop into the tread of the sliding door, preventing it from being opened. Anyone who has a sliding glass door would know how this works, but if anyone needs further explanation, I'm happy to furnish it. So when I came home, I would whip out my little remote control, make the RC car run off and lift the bar, then gain access to the apartment. To prevent this system from being discovered, I papered the inside of the sliding door with butcher paper, and I ran a wire outside of the door in an obvious manner, so that the roomie would think that this wire somehow, if tugged correctly, would undo the lock. To my knowledge, all of his attempts to get inside my apartment were by messing with this wire, which was attached to the handle of an antique coffee grinder and a paint can. If you tugged it, you'd get a wierd uneven resistance as the handle crank turned and the paint can danced, which added to the illusion that this wire was some secret way of ingress.

The rest of the story is mirrored here from the original thread on SomethingAwful (just for the record, this is nowhere near family-friendly, but I would expect you to know that simply from the title).