July cometh. A new year starts.

I still haven’t figured out why academic years start and end when they do.

Today is, I suppose, the exact mid-point of the year. It is six months after January 1, 2007, and six months until Jaunary 1, 2008. Midsummer Night.

The moon is full. Since the marine layer has moved in, it’s the only thing you can see in the sky besides the thick ocean fog.

365 days and counting until I’m en route to my destination, whereever that may be. Ideally, I’ll figure that out in another six months, but knowing what I know about my procrastinating nature, I certainly can’t promise anything.

By good fortune, most of the people graduating from my class whom I know relatively well are sticking around. It hasn’t hit me that I won’t see certain people on a regular, scheduled basis.

All endings are a beginning. All beginnings herald endings.

Jörmungandr the World Serpent suddenly pops into my head.

Is it mere coincidence that he is the son of Loki, the pre-eminent trickster god, frequently equated with the Native American god Raven?

Such things seem so improbable to be merely chance. And yet, the very power of chaos is to make the improbable actual.

So who is to say?

I will start missing folks acutely when I don’t see them around anymore.

The last three years seem to have gone by so fast, although only in retrospect. (Because God only knows how many late nights I stayed awake, fretting about when the sun would come out and relieve me of my awful duties.) I expect that time will continue to seem to speed up as I get older. There must be something in the brain and the body to cause this terrible amount of pain, and frankly, I’m not all that convinced that once this happens, the person will not be subjected to neediness and resource allocation.

As Robert Heinlein once said, there ain’t know such thing as a free lunch.

The Fool is an auspicious card, depicting potential.

You are The Fool

The Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. The bag on the staff indicates that he has all he need to do or be anything he wants, he has only to stop and unpack. He is on his way to a brand new beginning. But the card carries a little bark of warning as well. Stop daydreaming and fantasizing and watch your step, lest you fall and end up looking the fool.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I’ve been reading Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space by Henning Genz which examines the phenomenon that we call the vacuum, which, thanks to quantum mechanics, is a much more interesting subject than you might think.

The Fool is card number zero among the major arcana, also depicting Nothingness. But because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the vacuum cannot be considered truly empty. Some physicists depict the vacuum as a roiling, chaotic, unpredictable sea of change, poetically named the quantum foam. Ghost particles proliferate then annihilate, preserving the law of conservation of mass and energy. These so called virtual particles pop in and out of existence, usually undetectable. Space as we know it is unrecognizable in the small scale, as quantum fluctuations cause transient tears and holes in the fabric of space-time, and yet space nonetheless appears smooth at a macroscopic level. But in extreme conditions, particularly, relativistic conditions, physicists like Stephen Hawking predict very strange phenomena.

I was first introduced to the notion of the vacuum and quantum foam when I read Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne back in the senior year of high school when I had to do a physics presentation. I ended up talking about Chandrasekhar’s limit and the different fates for stars of varying mass. All of the ways a star can die are interesting: white dwarfs, novae, neutron stars—and recently I found out about the possibility of quark stars. But the fate that even non-science people are probably most aware of is the strangest way a star can die, which is to form a black hole.

The study of black holes is likely one of the avenues that will eventually lead to the holy grail of physics: quantum gravity, also known as the grand unified theory, or the theory of everything. Modern physics is a disjointed discipline of two incompatible theories: general relativity, which essentially describes the force of gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. For the last half-century or so, the most brilliant minds on the planet have struggled with trying to get these two theories to mesh, but so far a solution has proved elusive. The most ballyhooed attempt at reconciling the relativity with quantum mechanics is string theory (and it has an even trendier name: M-theory.) But in many ways, M-theory is not really a theory. So far, it’s just a framework. No testable predictions have been formulated, and as any scientist knows, if you can’t come up with an experiment to test your theory, you’re not anywhere at all.

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Anyway, the event horizon of a black hole seems to be a perfect test case for any theory that aims to combine relativity with quantum mechanics. Classically speaking, the reason it’s called a black hole is because neither matter nor radiation can escape its gravitational grasp. Even light, the fastest thing in the universe, is sucked inexorably down into the ill-defined, almost nonsensical concept known as the singularity, an infinitesimal point of infinite mass that is predicted by relativity, but makes no sense whatsoever in quantum mechanics. But that is another mess entirely.

But the weird thing is that Stephen Hawking figured out that black holes should actually give off radiation. And by doing so, they eventually evaporate! The reason is because of virtual particles.

Virtual particles typically come in pairs: a particle and its anti-particle. For example, consider an electron and a positron, particles of equal mass and equal charge, but the charges are of opposite valence: electrons have negative charge, while positrons have positive charge. When these particles collide, they annihilate one another and electromagnetic radiation. These particles are theorized to come into existence and then disappear in time increments basically unmeasurable by our instruments. And no matter how many of these particle/anti-particle combinations pop out of the void, because they always cancel each other out, the laws of conservation of mass and energy are preserved.

But Hawking thought about virtual particle pairs that emerge near the event horizon of a black hole. The particles might pop out of the void with one heading away from the event horizon, and the other into the black hole. The particle heading for the black hole gets sucked into it, never to be seen again in this universe, and therefore, never able to annihilate with its virtual partner. This forces the antiparticle heading away from the black hole to become a real particle. The laws of conservation of mass and energy is preserved because the particle that ended up in the black hole causes the black hole to lose mass and energy. Hence, from the perspective of being outside the event horizon, it looks like the black hole is actually generating radiation, and that this is causing it to evaporate.

In some ways, you can get something from nothing, although in the end, the laws of conservation still hold.

But perhaps what is the most mysterious phenomenon is the origin of the universe itself, the ultimate act of getting something from nothing. It too deals with a singularity, although in reverse. As far as we can tell (and not every scientist agrees) the entire universe seems to have come from an infinitesimal point of infinite mass, expanding inexorably to the 15 billion+ light-year horizons that we can observe, with no signs of stopping.

But how did the singularity come about? (Or are black holes the seeds for baby universes? Do the singularities that are the remnants of dead stars blossom into big bangs that are forever hidden from our eyes behind the point-of-no-return that is the event horizon?)

Why is it that there is more matter than anti-matter? If the universe was the result of a random quantum fluctuation in the vacuum, how did the initial anomaly avoid simply annihilating and returning to nothingness?

Is it all just pure, unbelievable luck? Or maybe intelligent design? Yikes!

One thing I know for sure: never underestimate the power of chaos. That’s the thing that I think creationists/intelligent designers fail to take into account. Chaos can cause unbelievable complexity. That’s essentially what evolution is: random, chaotic events shaping the development of organisms.

Basically, I think that if you believe in luck, then you have to believe in evolution.

Without chaos, everything becomes sterile and predictable, deterministic and fatalistic. Complete order would mean being able to predict the future with utmost certainty. A world that, frankly, wouldn’t need an omnipotent deity to run it. And yet we know that that’s not the universe we live in. We can’t predict what’s going to happen in the next minute, much less the next week, the next year, or the next 15 billion years. Chaos reigns eternal.

From Chaos came Cosmos. From Cosmos, is eternal Chaos.

The universe came from disordered nothingness, and yet the order of the universe is permeated—and maybe even driven—by random chance quantum events like the creation and annihilation of virtual particles.

It sounds like an analog to the Yin and Yang of Taoism.

I think I was meant to be a Discordian.

All hail Eris, Goddess of Disorder.

Found on Gura’s Blog:

My score on The Classic Dames Test:Katharine Hepburn (You scored 21% grit, 33% wit, 47% flair, and 9% class!)

You are the fabulously quirky and independent woman of character. You go your own way, follow your own drummer, take your own lead. You stand head and shoulders next to your partner, but you are perfectly willing and able to stand alone. Others might be more classically beautiful or conventionally woman-like, but you possess a more fundamental common sense and off-kilter charm, making interesting men fall at your feet. You can pick them up or leave them there as you see fit. You share the screen with the likes of Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant, thinking men who like strong women.Find out what kind of classic leading man you’d make by taking the Classic Leading Man Test.

Link: The Classic Dames Test (OkCupid Free Online Dating)

The Classic Leading Man test, for some reason, thought I was like John Wayne. Bleh. John freaking Wayne?!?! Fuck that guy! I pee on your grave.

Gorked is a word we like to throw around the emergency department and the hospital wards from time to time. In our general usage of the term, it basically means someone who is non-responsive, generally comatose (as opposed to mere altered mental status/delirium.) In some ways, it has an iatrogenic connotation to it, as it is sometimes used to describe patients who are inadvertantly rendered unresponsive due to excessive dosing of medication (although the more common terminology for this condition is snowed) or unresponsive because of a bad clinical outcome, such as massive stroke, brain hemorrhage, post-code brain (so called because this is what tends to happen when they call a code blue [cardiac and/or respiratory arrest emergency] and it takes more than 8 minutes to get you back, meaning that there is bigtime hypoxic-ischemic brain injury—no oxygen or bloodflow to the brain), or post-bypass brain (which is usually a lot more subtle, and usually has psychiatric qualities to it, but occasionally, someone who gets a coronary artery bypass graft—abbreviated as CABG and affectionately pronounced like “cabbage”—gets gorked.)

The word gork can actually be found in the dictionary, defined specifically as “anesthetized.” The etymology is unclear, but one theory is that it is an acronym that means ”god only really knows”,” referring to the fact that frequently, we don’t really know why a particular patient is gorked.

A typical conversation:

Resident: So what’s wrong with him? Intern: I don’t know. He’s just gorked.

Interestingly, the word has apparently metastasized outside of its medical context, and people frequently speak of things that are gorked, that is, broken and/or non-functional.

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Which may have contributed to the related term borked. This term has a narrow application that arose in the 1980s, specifically meaning the torpedoing of the career of an aspiring politico by impugning their character and background, derived from the fraught debate over the confirmation to the Supreme Court of Robert Bork, a Reagan nominee. I imagine it has similar connotations to swiftboating.

But borked arose again in a different context, the nerd argot of leetspeak, which typically utilizes oddities of typography and the idiosyncrasies of a QWERTY keyboard. The original root is broken, which mutated into borken, then b0rken by a common principle employed in leetspeak, and finally abbreviated even more to b0rked, then renormalized as borked.

Yet another independent origin for bork likely comes from Jim Henson’s muppet, the Swedish Chef, who utters the trademark phrase “Børk! Børk! Børk!”

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Finally, there is the related word horked, which basically means the same thing as borked and thus has much in common with gorked. Interestingly, there is a theory that horked is actually a corruption of gorked. (You’ll have to search for it because there aren’t any anchors to link to.) But I think that it is likely derived from the cartoon character Ren Hoëk (pronounced as “Hork”) It so happens that hork is also an onomatopoeic word frequently used in the show to describe the sound a cat makes when coughing up a hairball, itself likely derived from the phrase hacking up a hairball, and also related to the phrase hawking (or hocking) up a loogie, which actually was recorded as early as 1581.

I feel utterly tired and spent. I have spent the last two weeks living an unnatural existence, forced to try to sleep during the day and stay awake at night. I can almost imagine my adrenal glands screaming, trying to pump out enough cortisol and epinephrine to keep me from crashing. After my last shift tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up sleeping until Monday.

Wow. This sounds bad.

Scrotal perforation by a ventriculoperitoneal shunt.

Although this doesn’t help me or my patient at this juncture.

• Got into a heated discussion on a social network about immigration reform. Let me just say: racism is alive and well in 2007. Watch for crosses burning, folks.
• I drove for two hours to a distant Fry’s looking for a Gigabit USB adapter. Apparently they don’t sell them anymore. I guess it is kind of silly. Here you are attaching a device that can supposedly transfer data at a rate of 1000 megabits per second (2000 if you’re using full duplex) and it’ll get bottlenecked at a rate of 480 megabits per second because that’s the technical limit on the USB port. Still, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to watch files transfer from my desktop to my laptop at a measly 100 megabits per second over Fast Ethernet. How did people ever live with USB 1.1?

Quizzes. Not from J™. Unfortunately I don’t remember the source.

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

78%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Online Dating

OK this one is from J™:

And in the same vein:

You’re Strung Out on MySpace!!!
Take Are you addicted to MySpace? today!
Created with Rum and Monkey’s Personality Test Generator.

You Are 44% Addicted to Myspace

Your Myspace addiction factor is: Moderate You’re slowly building a very strong addiction to Myspace. Get out while you still can!

Curse you, Tom.

And Rupert Murdoch needs to hire some people who actually know how to code. Myspace looks like Web 1.0 circa 1996. I’m surprised that they actually use CSS. And that the blink tag isn’t all over the place inducing epilepsy.

A few small gems that made me laugh out loud that I found while looking for potential admits on tonight’s emergency department board:

On the disposition column next to a patient’s chief complaint, where they usually notate where the patient is going to go next (e.g., radiology, discharge home, admit medicine, admit ICU, etc.):

Wants to get his ass kicked!

On another patient complaining of penile discharge and testicular swelling, in the chart where it usually notes pre-hospital care (e.g., IV started, oxygen given, sublingual nitroglycerin given, intubated in the field, defibrillated in the field, coded for 55 minutes in the field, etc.):

Has been smoking marijuana to relieve pain

I don’t know if it’s because I have just a touch of risk-seeking behavior, but the concept of backward compatibility was never a compelling reason for me to expect that people would deliberately sabotage innovation. And yet, witness the gutted shell that is Vista, which is lacking interesting features like WinFS and Monad/Powershell (although this is eventually going to be released), features that would actually make me want to explore this brave new OS. (And these are only the most infamous of the scrapped features, to boot.)

A glance back at personal computing history shows that backward compatibility was never an excuse to forego new features. I can even remember the 8-bit days of yore when I was a Commodore fan boy. While there was theoretically a compatibility continuum between the PET, the VIC-20, and the C64, each iteration of personal computer had more and more features, generally at the expense of other features. (I mean, it must’ve been tough, working with only like, what, 32k of RAM? A thousand times less RAM than my cel phone?) Their floppy drives, which were in fact independent computers, had even more iterations of CBM-DOS, each barely compatible with the one before. The most popular version, CBM-DOS 2.6, had completely abandoned the notion of dual drives (which sadly ended up causing bizarre bugs)

While the Plus 4 and the C16 may seem like a testament to the dangers of completely abandoning backward compatibility, the C128 offers the opposite lesson entirely. The Commodore 128 was built with backward compatibility in mind, in order to leverage the huge amount of software available to the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, this discouraged developers from exploiting the C128’s unique features, and it never came close to reaching the popularity of the C64. Even more distressing, though, is that the C128 was the last in the line of PET-like machines. From then on out, Commodore went with the Amiga, which was actually quite a successful product, many of which are still in use to this day, but which never caught on, eclipsed by the Macintosh. Finally, Commodore started making x86 clones, which eventually led to the complete demise of the company.

The other reason why I think backward compatibility is bunk is because no one buys a gaming system for backward compatibility. The first one to offer such a feature was Sony’s Playstation 2, and probably the only reason that it didn’t suffer a C128-like fate was because the Playstation 1 architecture was incredibly ancient by then. (Still good for a few games, though.)

Think back to the jump from MS-DOS 6.22 to Windows 3.11. Clearly you couldn’t continue to write console-based, multitasking-unfriendly applications if you wanted to be taken seriously. (Oh, I know, there are plenty of console-based applications still around, but most of them were first built for UNIX, meaning that you can’t monopolize the CPU anyway, like badly written Win16 and Mac Classic apps can.) Sure, the transition took a while, but I don’t see anyone crying about not being able to run their MS-DOS-based apps from 1992. You either get with modern times, or you don’t upgrade, simple as that. (I mean, there are still people running version 2.2 of the Linux kernel, after all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!)

With CPUs as powerful as they are now, and with RAM and hard drive space being cheaper than dirt, I don’t see any reason to hobble your OS with backward-compatible handicaps. You just virtualize. Run your old apps in a sandbox that can’t take the rest of the OS down with it. That’s how the transition from MS-DOS to Windows 95 worked (in theory.) This is how Apple managed the transition from their Classic OS to OS X.

Maybe I’m just thinking too much about the standard development cycle of popular Open Source projects. When GNOME retooled their architecture during the transition from version 1 to version 2, with little-to-no heed given to backward compatibility, the developers took it in stride. In a matter of months, there were GTK2/GNOME2 versions of various apps like Evolution, Galeon, Nautilus, and the GIMP, and while you could still run GTK1/GNOME1 versions with the proper libraries installed, it was kind of ugly, and there really wasn’t that big of a reason to. Even the monolith that was Mozilla was up and ready in a timely fashion.

But maybe that’s just the open source community.

When you’re doing this for money, the timeframes apparently change quite drastically.

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From a software consumer’s standpoint, it seems like backward-compatibility is just an excuse for developers to be lazy and not work to implement new features. It gives them an alibi for why their app doesn’t play nice with the latest-and-greatest OS. But software is not supposed to be stagnant. You don’t just write a program and expect to collect money from it for the rest of your life. Even the RIAA is learning that sad lesson.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a developer. The extent of my hacking history lies in the good old 8-bit days when I was hand-coding machine language programs into BASIC DATA statements. I learned, of all things, Pascal (which happened to be the programming language tested on the AP Computer Science test) and tried to muck around with C and C++, but eventually gave up with that and ended up learning Perl instead.

I once wrote an extraordinarily kludgy medical record-keeping application for my dad in Turbo Pascal 5.0 (He still kept hard copies of everything anyway, thankfully) and when I used to work as a medical biller, I wrote a little script to help me keep track of things in Visual Basic for Microsoft Office(!) which rapidly turned into a nightmarish, molasses-like application experience.

So I’ve never really written a program that anyone has (exclusively) depended on, and I did very little bug-fixing, and much less optimization.

I can only imagine what it means to be involved in a massive corporation working on a little subroutine or object class that happens to be crucial to the project, and hoping that it’s well-implemented enough and documented well enough that it won’t bring the entire project crashing down.

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On the flip side, I gave up on Windows in 1999, and most of the apps I use are Open Source, or at least based on Open Source. From 1999 to 2002, I was running Red Hat Linux as my main OS, until I decided to get a laptop. (At the time, Linux support for laptops kind of sucked. It would’ve been a major pain in the ass, I think.) I couldn’t stomach the idea of switching back to Windows, so I bought a Mac.

The irony is that as an undergrad, I was a proponent of x86-based hardware, and thereby staunchly against the very proprietary nature of Macintosh hardware. Now I don’t think I ever thought Windows was “cool”, but me and my roommate would have Mac vs. PC arguments all the time.

The other issue I had with the Mac was it’s GUI-only nature. I had grown up on the command-line, and I couldn’t (and actually still can’t) fathom the idea of interacting with your computer only through a mouse. (Even as I type this, I have a few terminal windows open in Mac OS X. It’s still easier for me to hit Cmd-Tab, type cd ~, and then open some-file—using command completion in zsh—than it is for me to click on the Finder icon, navigate to my home folder, scan the thousands of unsorted files sitting there, and finally double-click on it.)

But bizarrely, it was Linux (along with X and GNOME) that taught me to love the GUI. You could do all sorts of weird stuff with the various window managers available, like have windows resize to set dimensions (useful for previewing HTML at small screen sizes) or automatically having all your windows roll up and stack themselves in a line on the right side of the screen. It was a matter of a few mouse-clicks to get a window to stay at the top of the pile, no matter how many other windows you opened up. I also grew dependent on multiple desktops (the fact that this is missing in Mac OS X is only made bearable because of Exposé.) And at the time (in the summer of 2000), GNOME had the only open-source web browser with tabs (Galeon), a feature that all modern browsers now have, and which I can’t use a browser without. (IE 6?! Bleh. Bleh. Bleh.)

The only thing that made switching to Mac OS X palatable was the fact that it had an entire UNIX subsystem running underneath the pretty GUI. Meaning, unlike Mac OS Classic, you could drop out into a terminal, and navigate and manipulate your filesystem with little cryptic commands like cd, ls, find, xargs, and grep. And meaning that you could (1) run an X server and (2) compile all the apps that I was using on Linux and use them on the Mac. For a while, Galeon still remained my browser of choice (until I found Camino, neé Chimera)

But X is a hungry beast, and after a while, I got tired of hard drive thrashing, and I couldn’t afford to buy more RAM. So eventually I settled into Mac OS X proper. Right now I have seven applications up, not counting the Finder or the Dashboard: (1) Mail.app (2) Vienna (3) Safari (4) iTerm (5) Chicken of the VNC (6) VLC (7) Preview.app. Five of these seven are open source projects. All of them have equivalents on Linux and Windows (with Cygwin installed.) As you can see, I’m not a big fan of proprietary software. (Hell, I grew up in a time when people would type in huge programs from the back of a magazine, sometimes entirely in raw machine language—just strings of unadorned hexadecimal numbers. My word processor of choice on the Commodore 64 was Speedscript, which came out of the back of Compute!’s Gazette.)

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What inspired this rehashing of my own personal computing history was this post on The Old New Thing discussing a very poorly thought out function called IsBadXxxPtr which supposedly tells you whether or not a pointer is valid or not.

And frankly, I find it astounding. Not so much that these functions exist, because they are probably useful to somebody somewhere trying to debug something. But that these functions would be allowed to escape into production code, resulting in a situation where you can’t just get rid of these functions without breaking apps.

I try to figure out why this should be so, and why such practices never make it into production UNIX code (other than the fact that the standard APIs don’t have functions like these.)

Is it because there are so many Windows developers, in contrast to the number of *nix/Linux/Mac OS X developers? That maybe these kinds of kludgy functions exist in core APIs, but they can be easily deprecated because not that many apps actually rely on their bad behavior? That the apps that would break wouldn’t cause a massive uproar?

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I don’t know. I feel like backward compatibility is overrated. If you want to stay compatible, then you shouldn’t upgrade your system. Problem solved. I mean, people still run CP/M and VAX/VMS, don’t they? There are probably even a few MS-DOS boxes floating around somewhere, maybe even connected to a network!

Meanwhile, the bleeding edge can throw out the baby with the bath water and actually innovate. And if you, as a developer, feel that you just can’t live without these new features, then you’ve got to rewrite your app so that you can compile it against the new API.

Isn’t this a massive reduplication of effort? Not necessarily. If you have clean code that is well documented, you might get away with just rewriting a few functions here and there.

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This certainly reminds me of the general debate about Windows Vista. Microsoft could’ve pulled an Apple and they could’ve just scrapped all the legacy code and started fresh. And to keep the break from being overly traumatic, they could’ve done what Apple did with Mac OS Classic. They could’ve just turned the old Windows stuff into a stand-alone virtualized system. After all, they already own Virtual PC, so why not? Most people have dual-cores these days, and the other core just sits idly by, why not give it something to do? And maybe they could also have a compatibility layer (akin to Apple’s Carbon API) so that all those Windows developers wouldn’t have to just start from the beginning all over again, and they could continue to develop new apps that would run both on XP and Vista—natively, without having to run the virtualized Windows Classic.

All sorts of doom and gloom was predicted when they abandoned Mac OS entirely and adopted Jobs’ baby, NeXTSTEP, which much of OS X is based on. But that’s now ancient history, with Apple making yet another jump (albeit this time on the hardware side.) And how many people still write Carbon apps these days?

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But a lot of these problems stem from the fact that, despite being nearly 40 years old, C is still the dominant language for developers. Sure, there’s C++, but is new and delete really all that different from malloc and free? Manual memory management seems like such a Sisyphean task. That’s why I quickly gravitated to scripting languages which generally use garbage collection. After all, I learned to program in BASIC, of all things. Commodore’s BASIC 2.0 was infamous for the incredibly long pauses when garbage collection was triggered, but I could live with that. I mean, it wasn’t bad for a computer running at 1 MHz.

In time, we’ll have a generation of coders who have cut their teeth on Java and C# and Python and Ruby, who won’t know or care about dangling pointers. Until then, we’ll have to continue to deal with the kludgy ways that developers utilize in an effort to avoid shooting themselves in the foot, and their crash-provoking consequences.

Bush and Cheney’s disdain for the rule of law—to the point of disobeying their own laws—has been flitting around in my consciousness for the past couple of days. On one hand, it’s not surprising at all. Ever since the election of 2000, W and his cronies have been breaking laws and have tried to consolidate the supreme power of the executive branch. From W’s usurpation of the presidency, to the illegal war in Iraq, the abolition of habeas corpus, the institution of torture, and W’s unlawful signing statements, these bastards have far exceeded Nixon’s violations. But Devilstower on The Daily Kos puts it into chilling perspective.

This is the battle, folks. We lose this one, we lose America. Forever. Live free or die.

Again, more quizzes from J™.

You Are Scissors

Sharp and brilliant, you can solve almost any problem with that big brain of yours. People fear your cutting comments - and your wit is famous for being both funny and cruel. Deep down, you tend to be in the middle of an emotional storm. Your own complexity disturbs you. You are too smart for your own good. Slow down a little - or you’re likely to hurt yourself. You can cut a paper person down to pieces. The only person who can ruin you is a rock person. When you fight: You find your enemy’s weak point and exploit it. If someone makes you mad: You’ll do everything you can to destroy their life

The Unofficial Apple Weblog momentarily speculates that Safari for Windows could be based on Yellow Box for Windows, which was a port of OpenStep (the NEXTSTEP framework that became Cocoa) to Windows back in the end of the last millenium, before Mac OS X was ever released. But this is quickly quashed, as analysis of the code shows that Safari for Windows does not use Cocoa or Objective C.

This is not surprising, considering Webkit (the rendering engine that Safari is based on) is a fork of KHTML, which is written in C++.

I think that Apple has probably completely abandoned Yellow Box for Windows. This is, after all, a code base that is nearly a decade old, intended to run on Windows NT and Windows 95. It would take a lot of work to port the modern Cocoa framework, and even more work to make it suitable for Windows Vista.

I think that the new paradigm will be the integration of hypervisors into the OS. Parallels Desktop for Mac is an example of a hypervisor, which is already capable of running Mac OS X apps simultaneously with Windows apps, the way that the Classic environment allows you to run OS 9 apps at the same time as OS X apps, and sort of the way that you can run Aqua and X at the same time. And there is an open source hypervisor called Xen that vendors like RedHat want as part of the Linux kernel.

While porting Cocoa to Windows would certainly expose the framework to way more developers, it would also remove any incentive to migrate from Windows to Mac OS X, and Cocoa would probably be wrongly blamed for the security problems that are already inherent in the Windows platform.

So I thought about the story of Snow White, how her mom pricks her finger on a sewing needle, and when she sees a drop of blood upon the white cloth she is sewing, she thinks of naming a daughter Snow White. So she gives birth, and then dies.

What a lovely story.

Then again, there’s the story of Sleeping Beauty, who pricks her finger on a spinning wheel, and ends up in metabolic stasis for a century or so.

So as I rifled through the remains of my move from Chicago to L.A. back in aught-four, I pricked my finger on a needle from a curtain. Don’t ask me how. Just know that it did happen. The first thing that popped through my head was, when was the last time I had a tetanus shot. I’m pretty sure it must’ve been within the past 10 years because I had to get boosted in order to get into med school. The second thing was that it would really suck to get lockjaw. Luckily, my brother is an RN, so theoretically he should be able to keep me alive with CPR until the ambulance shows up.

Naturally, this leads to a reverie on mortality. Now it’s been a while since I’ve watched someone literally die (oh, maybe a couple of months now) There is something almost absurd about being woken up at 2:30 am to come watch someone die, and not be able to do a damn thing about it. You pound on their chest, you crack their ribs, you inject extraordinarily toxic chemicals into their blood stream in the hope of flogging the heart some more, even though you knew that they were going to die even before you went to sleep.

The sad thing is that a good part of the time, when the patient comes in, it’s pretty much too damn late. Oh, sure, they may be walking/talking, they may be completely with it, with stable vital signs, but you look at them and you know they’re dying. Not just like in some Zen sort of way, the way we’re all dying as soon as we’re born, or some similar sort of poetic mumbo-jumbo coming out of the mouths of sages and seers, but really, actively, rapidly dying, as in, I’m not sure they’re going to last the week. Maybe three days, tops.

What to do, what to do? If you’re lucky (like I have been this past weeks), you hand them off to somebody else, head home, and sleep easy with your conscience, come back to work, and find the patient dragged off to the morgue. C’est la vie. Or perhaps, more appropriately, c’est la mort.

Otherwise, you wait. You come in every so often, checking the monitors pointlessly, as numbers that are supposed to stay high start drifting down and numbers that are supposed to stay low start shooting up. Oh, maybe you can add a pressor or two, or some fluids and what not, maybe even stack on yet another antibiotics, but the game is over, friends. Death is the ultimate casino. The house always, always wins, and it doesn’t look like anyone has even come close to beating those odds. (No one reliable, at least, resurrections and reincarnations notwithstanding.)

---

But enough about work.

Still, I couldn’t get the idea of death out of my head. One of the sucky things about being mortal, I think, is that there’s not possible way to do everything you want to do. You are literally living on borrowed time, so you gotta squeeze out as much as you can and prioritize.

How important is it for you to get married, have kids, buy a house, and yadda-yadda-yadda through the American Dream?

Personally, I haven’t figured out anything I want yet. Maybe one day it’ll come to me like an epiphany, like a train barrelling down the tracks with me tied to the rail. You can’t escape your destiny. But until then, everything is behind the curtain, covered in a very opaque veil.

I think one of the important lessons I’ve learned on this sojourn of three years going on four is that there’s no point in thinking too far ahead. As Tyler Durden says, extend the timeline long enough and the survival rate always drops to zero. So I’m content to live in the moment, taking things day-to-day, hour-by-hour. Planning for the future seems like such a fucking waste of time these days. There is a niggling sensation in the back of my head that it’s probably a mistake to not think about the future at all, but if death is coming like a thief in the night, and there’s no possible way to no the appointed hour, then what’s the point, really?

Not that I expect an easy answer. It’ll be something that I’ll have to mull over for a while. Maybe another decade or two, and I’ll have the sketchy beginnings of an answer.

---

I suppose what brought this on (besides the fact that it’s the end of yet another academic year. My twenty-fifth year of education. Lordy, lordy, lordy) is the fact that the summer solstice has come and gone, and from here on out, the days are once again getting shorter.

Nothing lasts forever.

And I suppose the older you get, the harder it is to ignore that fact.

It’s 5 am and I’m actually at work, where I am allowed to sleep. Unfortunately, I’m all keyed-up and can’t seem to sit still. Hurry up and wait, indeed.

I got to thinking about how my life has been organized in four year blocks, running on an academic schedule from (roughly) July-June. Technically, the academic year has one more week left in it (at least where I’m at) and then I’m off to the final year of my residency.

Holy mother of God.

I remember starting this particular journey in this particular hospital, doing night-float, which essentially means the guy who puts out fires. Not literally (usually) But you’re the go -to guy when something untoward and unexpected happens to a patient that you pretty much really don’t know, except for the one paragraph blurb that your fellow intern wrote for you before he/she went home.

I described it—and would still describe it—as incredible amounts of boredom interspersed with moments of panicked terror.

---

Called it ennui. Called it being jaded. The pathologies I’m up against haven’t at all changed, and my armamentarium of solutions is not really all that much more impressive. To quote the Fat Man yet again, the optimum delivery of medical care is to do as much nothing as possible, which is really just an obtuse but funny way of putting Hippocrates’ injunction to do no harm.

And yet the terror is replaced a lot of times by annoyance. Impatience. (Mostly with the emergency department and the nurses, respectively. Uneasy allies even in the best of times.)

I used to sweat bullets when someone started to literally die, even when it was expected. I suppose now, I can see impending death from a mile away. I can find it just by looking at the emergency room board and the one liner next to the patient’s name.

You see enough of anything, maybe it’s just human nature to get used to it.

Sad and disturbing, perhaps.

---

But if I could choose which way I would die, or if I could choose which organ system would fail first, I certainly wouldn’t choose the liver. End-stage liver disease is perhaps one of the most excruciating, long, and dragged out way to go. (Metastatic cancer, particularly of the gastrointestinal tract, is perhaps a close second.) While heart failure or respiratory failure, or—God help you—brain failure (read, massive incapacitating stroke) is no walk in the park, either, these things tend to make you dead in seconds. There’s no long and drawn out suffering and agony. There’s no ambivalence as to whether or not they should keep trying to perform heroic measures. One moment you’re alive, the next moment you’re dead, end-of-story, and everyone leaves at least with some sort of definitive closure. Oh sure, you can leave anyone on a ventilator for a long period of time, but the soul is gone, man. Evacuated. An empty shell that only has primitive reflexes and can’t feel a damned thing. Eventually, even it, too, falls apart, no matter what you do. But you’re de facto if perhaps not de jure dead. Call it quits, man. Pull the plug.

The sad, sad, very sad thing about end-stage liver disease is much of it is preventable. If you outlawed alcohol the way we outlawed heroin and crack, I guarantee that the incidence of end-stage liver disease would drop. I mean, you’ve really got to drink to kill your liver. The liver is one tough mother, man. It’s the proletariat of the human body, doing all the dirty jobs that no one else wants to do. You can even hack half of it off and it’ll grow back, I shit you not. So when you kill it, you’ve really killed it. It takes effort to destroy your liver. You’ve got to actively pursue it. You’ve got to dedicate time to it.

So, yeah, I’m sure there would be lots of hard-core alcoholics who would find some way to get their fix even if alcohol were outlawed, but still.

---

My particular solution would be to outlaw alcohol and legalize marijuana. Oh, sure, you can still die of lung cancer or emphysema, and while they can be slow, drawn out ways to die, too, it’s still not as horribly awful as the experience of the liver bomb. Yes, I would rather have lung cancer than cirrhosis. Simple as that.

The other thing is, when’s the last you heard of a pothead getting involved in a high-speed crash and obliterating an entire family of four? (And don’t tell me it’s because marijuana is not as common as alcohol. That may be so, but it sure is pretty damn common.) Most potheads I’ve met would (1) not be able to find their keys (2) not be able to find their car (3) be too lazy to make the effort to find them anyway and (4) even if somehow they made their way behind the wheel of their car, chances are they would either fall asleep before even turning on the ignition, or they would creep home at 5 mph in neutral, wondering why they’re stepping on the accelerator all the way to the floor, and not going any faster.

The lesser of two evils, I say.

I’m convinced that the beer companies have conspired to keep marijuana illegal, because they know that people would easily switch to a less toxic drug.

---

On a related note, I think we should endeavor to make heroin much cheaper than methamphetamines. As anyone who’s in the know knows, methamphetamines are classically the drug of choice of poor white trash. If there were ever a drug that could be considered less classy than crack, this would be it.

I’ve seen people do horrible things to themselves and to other people while hopped up on crystal meth—blowing an aneurysm, having a heart attack, having a massive stroke, or going aggro and shooting up a neighborhood, or hacking up their girlfriend into tiny pieces with a chainsaw. Heroin users are way more mellow people. About the worst thing that can happen is that they stop breathing, which, while bad, is theoretically reversible. (Of all the drugs of abuse, the one we can reverse quickly and life-savingly is in fact heroin.) If heroin were dirt cheap (and not that black-tar shit, seriously—I’ve actually seen quite a few people get botulism from that crap) I bet you that people would gravitate to it in a heartbeat.

And we would get to practice a lot more intubations.

But I digress.

---

Somehow I always wander far afield from the topic at hand. Suffice it to say, I’m tired, but I can’t go to sleep, and I can almost guarantee that as soon as I go to sleep, my pager will go off.

Damn it.

How will I die? Your Result: You will die while having sex.   Your last moments in this life will be enjoyable indeed…hopefully. Do not fear sex. Try not to become celibate as a way of escaping death. You cannot run from destiny.
You will die in a car accident.
You will die in a nuclear holocaust.
You will die while saving someone’s life.
You will die from a terminal illness.
You will die in your sleep.
You will die of boredom.
You will be murdered.
How will I die? Create a Quiz

Now, dying in flagrante delicto is all right with me. Although I hope it won’t be like these two sad fuckers.

You Belong in 1992

With you anything goes! You’re grunge one day, ghetto fabulous the next. It’s all good!

Ah, those were the days.

I literally skim through 400+ RSS feeds a day. I kind of wonder where my limit is. The point where it starts to feel onerous, and that I’ll never ever get any real work done.

The reason why it’s anywhere close to manageable is the fact that most of the feeds are blogs and not news sites. The new sites (like Slashdot, and in particular, Digg) pump out tons of articles a day, and there’s no way in hell that I’d ever read them all. (And, luckily, too, most of the stuff on Digg is crap, with shitty headlines, and even shittier synopses, thereby frequently compelling me to avoid reading said pile-o’-shit. Seriously. Don’t say shit like “Title says it all.” These guys need copy-editors or something. Even so-called artificial intelligence could do a better job of making compelling blurbs. Seriously, if you had a Mac, you could just copy an article and feed it to the Summarize service. Screw around with the slider. Presto! Instant compelling blurb!)

Man, is this a flight-of-ideas, or what?

Anyway, the point is that individuals rarely post at a rate where I can’t keep up.

---

And the whole point of that entirely tangential prologue is that I’ve managed to find blogs of people from college, which is always interesting. It’s neat to see the different paths people have taken, some ten years (!) out.

I know. In a way, it can be creepy. Someone you don’t know all that well reading your thoughts. I mean, sure, you voluntarily posted it there, but there’s still something weird about lurkers, you know?

I kind of wonder if it blogging has decreased the number of spontaneous phone calls people make to long-distant, remote friends. Perhaps the number of face-to-face meetings have decreased as well. I mean, why bother calling to find out how someone is doing, when you can just read their blog from your own cel phone, for God’s sake?

---

OK. OK. This is what I was going to write. (Instead you get the above freakishly long prologue full of diversions and excursions.)

Olivia, whom I haven’t seen since I left Berkeley nearly 10 years ago, reminds me that today is the summer solstice. The longest day of the year (and ergo, the shortest night of the year, which the way I’m looking at it, since I’ve been working nights for a week now. I blame that for my current flavor of insanity.)

I try not to think about the fact that despite it being the beginning of summer, it’s really all down hill from here.

(Yeah. I kind of dislike winter. December and January are OK, but February starts fucking with my brain, and I’m pretty much a wreck by March. Thank God I’m back in California, where spring actually starts in spring. Damn seasonal affective disorder.)

The New York Times published an article about how eldest children tend to be ever-so-slightly more “intelligent” than their younger sibs. (Found on Newsvine.)

(I put “intelligent” in quotes because these findings are based on IQ tests, which many people consider an arbitrary measure that is unable to truly separate out important variables like culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, et cetera. What are we actually measuring here? It’s just a composite number, a reification, not rooted in any sort of physiologic process. It does not directly reflect anything about the brain whatsoever, and is basically suspect as a good measure of innate mental ability.)

Interestingly, though, this dynamic seems to kind of hold true in my family.

Now don’t get me wrong. My sibs are by no means drooling morons. Both of them are quite educated and professionals. But looking back, I kind of wonder what sort of frustration they dealt with growing up and always being compared to me. It certainly didn’t help that my brother had a lot of the same teachers I had in elementary school and high school. And even my sister found herself the student of my high school biology teacher.

Ultimately, it comes down to test-taking skills. Game theory. I thrive on multiple choice. I’ve always done well on standardized tests, something that, unfortunately, my sibs have sometimes struggled with.

But we all know that standardized tests aren’t necessary meaningful.

Still, what I found interesting about the article are the theories of why there should be a statistically significant difference.

I like the idea of being the bridge. The conduit. I even wrote my personal statement that got me into med school about this idea.

Being born the eldest, you automatically end up in two worlds. Especially if you grew up an only child for a good long while. My brother wasn’t born until I was four, for example. So I spent my formative years surrounded entirely by adults. This, no doubt, had a strong influence on my vocabulary, and even in my affinity to language in general. Of the three of us, I was the only one to actually learn Tagalog as a sort-of a first language. (Although, by now, my accent is atrocious, and my vocabulary is essentially at fourth-grade level or thereabouts.)

But I suppose a lot of it also had to do with the specific dynamics of my family. When I was learning how to speak, my dad happened to be studying for the board exam in Medicine (the ECFMG, which they administer to foreign medical graduates) I even remember being fascinated by the glossy pages in the Physician’s Desk Reference. (I’m surprised I didn’t become a pharmacist.) And then he ended up in a residency out in the Midwest, and for a little while, it was just me and my mom.

In retrospect, I kind of wonder if that’s why I feel like I never got to completely live out my childhood. Fear, doubt, uncertainty. I think kids just instinctively believe that their parents know how things are going to turn out (even when in reality, they don’t) and that their parents will always be there to protect them from the stark uncertainties of life in general. I think I learned at an early age that there was only so much my parents could do for me, and a lot of things, I would just have to face on my own.

Kind of a weird thing for, say, a second grader to have to wonder about, you know?

But: the whole bridge/conduit thing. When my brother, and then my sister were born, I almost naturally became the fulcrum on which the family balanced. Being a kid, but being more used to always being around adults.

I’ve always been about living in the interstices, I think.

The gap between generations. The gap between cultures (Philippine-born versus American-born). And so it went, the gap between the popular kids and the nerds and geeks. The gap between the hard science/techie guys and the humanities/social science folk/fuzzy guys. (It’s kind of funny that despite being rejected from there, the slang from Stanford has somehow managed to stick with me.) The gap between the mainstream Filipino Americans who were only into hip-hop and modded Japanese imports (so-called rice rockets) and DJ’ing and macking on the fly ladies, and the Filipino Americans on the periphery. The people who didn’t feel the need to always hang out with Filipinos. The folk who were more into activism and less into socializing. The artsy people. The people who had no desire whatsoever to go into medicine or engineering.

Maybe part of it is my passive nature. If you don’t make any effort, you get shunted to the periphery, the interstices. And you get comfortable with whereever you end up.

But it has always stuck with me. What I like is being the translator. The guy who can see two apparently completely disparate things and make a connection. The guy who can see the big picture, the forest instead of the trees. The generalities rather than the specifics. And then you translate. You try to convey the idea from one end to the other, something that people who are more tied to the center would naturally have a harder time doing.

It’s all about living in the periphery of both (or more) worlds.

Ultimately, besides helping people in general, and taking care of the sick, and trying to provide services especially to the poor and the underserved, what I see my role as is the translator. The guy who can put the scientific and medical gobbledygook into layman’s terms that will easily penetrate a patient’s consciousness. In some ways, it’s all about metaphoric imagery. Not everyone knows that the kidneys act as filters, but most people know what filters do, as a trite example.

But anyway. Maybe I’m just playing this up too much.

I just like putting together things that are disparate.

That’s probably why I like mash-ups. I remember in 8th grade, I predicted that we’d come to a point where alternative and hip-hop would somehow merge. And now we’ve got The Roots sampling Radiohead. And Kanye West sampling all sorts of random-ass shit. (I think I even wrote down this prediction somewhere. As if I’ll ever find it.) But whatever.

Some people call it apophenia. I like to think of it (in my own mind, at least) as an Art.

Which forgotten animated heroine are you?

You are Pocahontas Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Meh. Although the voice actress behind Pocohontas, Irene Bedard, is one cute Inuit lady.

What kind of weather are you? You are Snow You are calm, reflective, and a value peace. You enjoy solitude, and love nature. Click Here to Take This Quiz

Quizzes and Personality Tests

The irony is astounding. On the other hand, maybe I am a cold, heartless bastard.

You’re a Wooly Mammoth!
A little heavy and a lot shaggy, you move a little slower than the world around you. You definitely wish global warming would go away, and maybe even reverse itself a bit. You like long walks on the ice floe, and could even get stuck there without minding too much. Your favorite Sesame Street character is Snuffleupagus. Beware of tar pits… although you really didn’t need to be told that, did you?
Take the Animal Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Hmm. What’s with Arctic references. First, an Inuit woman. Then snow. Then wooly mammoths.

You’re Colombia!
You do a lot of drugs, and these have kind of distorted your view of reality, to the point that everyone looks like an enemy.  You keep trying to restore order over your schizophrenic world view, but you don’t even know which goal is your own and which is someone else’s.  You’re pretty sure someone needs to be punished for all this, but who that is changes all the time.  Things would be a lot better for you if you switched to coffee, or even to decaf, but all this money would be hard to give up.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

In keeping with the Arctic theme, I am the country whose major export is the drug that is sometimes colloquially known as snow. Brilliant.

You’re Ulysses!
by James Joyce
Most people are convinced that you don’t make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you’re saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Finally. Something not related to “Northern Exposure”. And yet, this modernist remake of the classic The Odyssey still alludes to a long, tiresome voyage where the hero seems like he’s never going to make it home.

What’s funny is that, while I totally dug modernism when I was an undergrad, I never ever read this book. You would think it would be right up my alley. Cryptic, with garbled allusions to classical literature, and an elitist, intellectual sheen. Maybe I should read it.

You’re Hawaii!
When they first meet you, few people can tell whether you want to say hello or goodbye. Either way, most of them will end up saying that you’re their favorite person to visit, if only they could afford the trip. But your soft and warm image is belied by an explosive undercurrent in your personality than can leave you drenched with tears or boiling with anger for days on end. You are rather fond of using plants as clothing.
Take the State Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Apparently we are segueing into another theme or two: (1) the prospect of a ridiculously long ocean voyage into the blue, just like how my ancestors apparently spent much of their time before the advent of European colonization. (2) the two states in the U.S. which are not part of the continental 48.

You’re the California Institute of Technology!
You are seen by many as a constantly rising star, but with the amount of work on your plate, you’re afraid of becoming a shooting star as well. Sometimes you take your bottled-up aggression out on pumpkins, or those younger than you, or even just bottle it up in rockets. Though you aren’t much for the opera, Wagner can wake you up in any situation. While many people view you as a Martian, you might be responsible for putting a human on Mars some day.
Take the University Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Hah! Yet another reference to a long, tedious voyage, this time among the sea of stars. Interestingly, the European Space Agency is looking for volunteers to participate in a simulated mission to Mars. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Russian. Damn it.

Once upon a time, I aspired to be a physicist. I was inspired by the Caltech professor Kip Thorne, namely, by his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. Sadly, I could hack it through calculus, barely passing a semester doing integrals. (The whole “Einstein sucked at math” thing is a myth. Just because he wasn’t brilliant enough to utilize a mathematical system that used operators that I don’t at all understand doesn’t mean he didn’t know how to do absurdly complex calculations with lesser tools.)

You’re Obama-Gore!
As Barack Obama, you are seen as the greatest hope in history for your people. You may even save the world before breakfast. Normally mild-mannered and unexperienced, tomorrow you will unearth your cloak and free the entire… Okay, even you can admit that maybe there’s a little hype surrounding your personality at this point. You are dynamic and feel you have a lot of potential, but could you ever live up to the lofty expectations and pressure being applied right now? You hope so.
You select Al Gore as your running mate because he wins in that position.
Take the 2008 Presidential Ticket Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

OK, I admit it. I fished around for this one. But, man, this would be a doozy!

This week is starting to really get to me. I only have to work for two more nights before I get a weekend.

I’m not sure I can take another week.

Working nights sucks.

---

From the several hundred random blogs I peruse, I stumbled upon this post about depression, and I remembered how depression actually sounds a lot like what I would imagine hell to be like.

Imagine that every single success, every single triumph, every single moment of joy in your life, no matter how wonderful, becomes grey ash. You don’t feel a goddamn thing.

Despite all the great things happening to you, you feel no pleasure. No happiness.

How excruciating does every single second become, when all you can feel is this dull, gnawing unhappiness, this draining sorrow? The sun is out, but everything looks grey.

The worst part is that no one gets it. Everyone else around you thinks you’re nuts. (And I suppose, technically, you are crazy, but that is scarcely a comforting thought.)

---

The road has always been long and hard.

I always fear that something unexpected will drag me back down into that treacherous pit of despair, but there’s no use in dreading the inevitable.

I have to always, always remind myself to take life one moment at a time. Lately work has been making me confront the fact that no one knows how much time is allotted to us, and while planning for disaster seems prudent, always expecting disaster just fucks up your mind.

Even the most terrible things become familiar, and you can even believe that you miss it once it’s all over. Talk about co-dependency.

It usually takes me a week before I come back to reality, but still.

I ramble.

The clock says 2:20 in the afternoon, but it feels like 2:20 in the morning. Bleh.

I really haven’t gotten the model thing to work for me. I like how I attract unstable people. Yay!

What type of person do you attract? Your Result: You attract artsy people! Those free spirited artists with great imaginations find you interesting. They are usually interesting themselves, so its not a bad thing, but they CAN be a bit wifty and choose odd goals. If you like life to always be a bit ‘different’ from the norm, but not too extreme in any one direction, these are the people for you. If you seek logical decision making skills and good money management, you may want to change something in the way you appear. Artsy people are fun for adventure and exploring, so, have fun! (smoking weed helps too)
You attract models!
You attract unstable people!
You attract Yuppies!
You attract geeks!
You attract rednecks!
What type of person do you attract? Quizzes for MySpace

I also wonder where exactly my last name comes from. It’s a really unique name, and pretty much anyone who has it is almost certainly related to me somehow.

Since there is a lot of Sanskrit influence on Tagalog and Cebuano, I wonder if it is at all related to Lord Jagannath, an aspect of the Hindu God Krishna (and from whom the English word Juggernaut is derived.)

I don’t know how this managed to elude me for so long, and I don’t really know what prompted me to look this up. Somehow I had stumbled upon the word kairos, which up to know I had merely thought of as the high-school retreat that my high school, along with many Catholic high schools, has seniors participate in. At my school, it wasn’t mandatory, so I never went. I hear that it can be quite life-changing and that it’s very touchy-feely. There insider motto is “Live the Fourth.” Since the Kairos retreat is three days long, I have been told that “the Fourth” means the fourth day, which basically means that one’s life should be lived as an extension of the Kairos experience.

But, as usual, I digress.

Kairos is a Greek word that literally means “right or opportune moment,” sometimes also rendered as “time in-between” and “God’s time.” Whereas the Greek concept of chronos denotes linear, quantized time, the time that is measured by clocks and calendars, kairos denotes an unquantifiable kind of time.

I suppose that kairos would be the proper word to use for the Big Bang, and anytime that might have preceded it, since chronos did not exist until the Big Bang. Or perhaps kairos can be applied to the literally imaginary time (as in time quantized by units of i) required by the theory of eternal inflation.

This is still not my point.

Where kairos led me was to the Sanskrit word kālá which sort of means the same thing. But what was interesting is that Kala is also the Javanese god of destruction, the son of Bathara Guru, the high lord of the gods.

The word “Bathara” or “Batara”, which means “god”, specifically referring to a class of gods distinct from dewata and dewa, seems clearly related to the Tagalog word Bathala, and apparently Bathala is an indigenous Southeast Asian concept.

Interestingly, Batara Kala is the consort of Setesuyara, the goddess of the underworld in Balinese mythology. It’s a stretch, but I wonder if she is related to Siginaugan/Siginaguran, the Visayan equivalent.

Anyway, I’m rambling.

I once had a dream about blogging, being irritated with the emergency department, and the planet Pluto. Somehow these elements randomly came together tonight for no particular reason, and I got this eerie feeling that somehow I can dream about the future. This isn’t the first time this has occurred, and it’s not just some déjà vu weirdness. Unfortunately, my dreams about the future are never useful.

(Listen to it on the Hype Machine: Radiohead “Lucky” (acoustic))

I’m on a roll, I’m on a roll this time I feel my luck could change.

Kill me Sarah, kill me again with love, it’s gonna be a glorious day.

Pull me out of the aircrash, Pull me out of the lake, ‘cause I’m your superhero, we are standing on the edge.

The head of state has called for me by name but I don’t have time for him. It’s gonna be a glorious day! I feel my luck could change.

Pull me out of the aircrash, Pull me out of the lake, ‘cause I’m your superhero, we are standing on the edge.

We are standing on the edge.

June. Before the solstice and the fading of the sunlight. The beginning of summer is always the ending of another year. Another epoch. As usual, I am always facing the brink of time alone, each time finding myself further and further from civilization. (A voice cries out in the wilderness.) The exile has never ended. I’ve lost any hope of finding a distant shore. Like The Flying Dutchman denied from mooring at any port, I am forced to sail on, sail on.

(inspired by a comment to a blog post by someone whom I’ve been blog-stalking on Myspace)

I already know what the ending is, at least in abstract terms. And there are good ways to good, and really bad ways as well. But you still go, one way or another.

The long dark. The Doom of Man. The endless sleep. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I can’t help but think that faith in the afterlife is just so much self-aggrandizement, but that’s an entirely different argument, and perhaps a future post.

The weird thing is, I suppose, the fact that no matter what path I choose from here on out, the end is still going to be same. Well, the details will vary, but exactly how much do you care about details when you’re dying? I don’t know. I never asked. I figure you can’t really answer anyway when you’re unconscious, with a breathing tube down your throat.

So what I really care about is the middle part. The meat of the action. The story.

Beginnings are interesting, but they only get you so far. Endings are sort of the icing on the cake. Most of them are satisfyingly predictable. (Although I realize there are many that are not.)

It’s all about the middle.

So now my sleep-wake cycle is completely fucked. It was probably a poor idea to have that Frappucino with an extra shot of espresso.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter since I’m going to be working nights for the next two weeks anyway.

The Hornivore Random Brutal Sex Master (RBSM) Don’t ever marry, you’re The Hornivore. Roaming, sexual, subhuman. The Hornivores (you) are some of the most screwed up and naughty beings in the Universe. And their numbers are growing, mostly due to skipped or misused contraception. You care not. There’s one thing you want, one sole need. Half manly, half bestial, you act on instinct, and animal charisma smoothes the way. It’s unlikely Your exact male opposite: The Slow Dancer Deliberate Gentle Love Dreamer you’re driven by much other than your own selfish, orgasmic requirements. Your appearance and personality have evolved for the hunt. Ass beckons, you oblige. For the record, you can happily bang all personality types, however your match percentages might be low with the kinder, more sensible people of the world, purely because they all wish to avoid you. Good luck to them. “One day, the villagers came with torches to the house. In the smoldering ashes, stray dogs looked for cooked flesh.” AVOID: The Priss (DBLD), The Sonnet (DGLD) CONSIDER: Half-Cocked (RBSD), Genghis Khunt (RBSM) Link: The Online Dating Persona Test @ OkCupid - free online dating.

From J™:

You liked the test?
so S P R E A D I T ! tell everyone!!! (use Quick-Paste below)

you wanna know MORE?
so check out, what Wikipedia says about your type…

…even more you’ll find in Google

or do you prefer to

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You are not completely happy with the result?!
You chose BZ

Would you rather have chosen:

AZ (THREE)

CZ (ONE)

BX (NINE)

BY (FOUR)

Link: The Quick & Painless ENNEAGRAM Test written by felk on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

For another view:

Which, not surprisingly, all averages out in the end. I took a similar test a while ago.

Your Personality Is

Idealist (NF) You are a passionate, caring, and unique person. You are good at expressing yourself and sharing your ideals. You are the most compassionate of all types and connect with others easily. Your heart tends to rule you. You can’t make decisions without considering feelings. You seek out other empathetic people to befriend. Truth and authenticity matters in your friendships. In love, you give everything you have to relationships. You fall in love easily. At work, you crave personal expression and meaning in your career. With others, you communicate well. You can spend all night talking with someone. As far as your looks go, you’ve likely taken the time to develop your own personal style. On weekends, you like to be with others. Charity work is also a favorite pastime of yours.

You Are 9: The Peacemaker

You are emotionally stable and willing to find common ground with others. Your friends and family often look to you to be the mediator when there is conflict. You are easy going and accepting. You take things as they come. Avoiding conflict at all costs, you’re content when things are calm. At Your Best: You feel connected, trusting, and fulfilled. You feel at peace with your place in the world. At Your Worst: You compromise your values to make sure peace is maintained. You give in to bullies. Your Fixation: Harmony Your Primary Fear: Causing conflict Your Primary Desire: To preserve things as they are Other Number 9’s: Marge Simpson, Ronald Reagan, Audrey Hepburn, Jerry Seinfeld, and Abraham Lincoln.

Your Aura is Violet

Idealistic and thoughtful, you have the mind and ideas to change the world. And you have the charisma of a great leader, even if you don’t always use it! The purpose of your life: saying truths that other people dare not say Famous purples include: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony Careers for you to try: Political Activist, Inventor, Life Coach

Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

(revised from ”Re: response to victor & malaki)

It is interesting to ponder whether or not Southeast Asians had a concept of “god” before the advent of Hinduism. There are quite a few religions where Supreme Beings do not really exist, for example, Buddhism and Taoism, but in these days, we tend to get all riled up about the People of the Book (meaning, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims)

But the discussion of “god” is hampered because of the vagueness of the term, which I think encompasses at least three different concepts: (1) a single benevolent creator entity found in monotheistic religions: e.g., God, YHWH, Allah, Ahura Mazda (2) mostly human entities with some superhuman powers: e.g., Zeus, Odin, Tiamat, Vishnu (3) spiritual forces associated with natural, domestic, or agricultural phenomenon: kami from Japan, genii from Ancient Rome, elves from Scandinavia.

From what I understand, spiritual beliefs in Southeast Asia were more resonant with concept (3) I’m also not sure that “worship” is necessarily the right term, or more likely, “worship” means different things depending on which god-concept you subscribe to, in which case it seems likely that the people who inhabited what later became the Philippines worshipped spirits that governed nature, home life, and agriculture. I recall that the spirit of rice was very prominent, as were the spirits of the jungle, the river, and the sea. I vaguely remember watching a video about how the forging of the kris blade was a ritual regarding the spirit of the sea, but I may just be making this up now.

Also, I think it is in the Darangen (the definitive epic poem of the Maranao people) that I first came across the word diwata used to refer to such spirits. The same word is found in Tagalog to mean, among other things, according to the dictionary, muse and goddess, and is undoubtedly related to the Tagalog word diwa, which I understand means soul or spirit.

Of note, diwa and diwata look obviously related to the Sanskrit word deva which mean deity, and through the putative Indo-European mother tongue is in turn related to Greek theos and Latin deus, meaning god.

In any case, it’s true that there aren’t any documents from the pre-Hindu era. Which makes sense since it seems generally believed that the writing systems evolved from Indic sources. But a lot of the information is apparently preserved in living culture, if my professor is to be believed. True, there aren’t really any “pure” Austronesian cultures anymore, but, much as Celtic animistic beliefs (i.e., the beliefs of the Druids) persisted in England despite the introduction and dominance of Roman, Scandinavian, and finally Christian beliefs, a prevalent idea is that a lot of the ancient Southeast Asian rituals are couched in terms of Hindu, Islamic, and Christian beliefs. (Like the anecdote that when Catholicism was introduced into the Philippines, saints simply took on the characteristics of whatever local spirits or deities were worshipped.) I immediately think of Maria Makiling, and the Santo Niño.

So, yeah, we will never know, but we can make educated guesses.

(revised from ”Cultural Origin of Dualism?”)

When I took a class on Southeast Asian history as a freshman in college, I felt like a veil had been lifted from my eyes. Up until that point, I felt that all Filipino culture was was the food and the language, and that we didn’t really have a culture outside of that derived from the waves of imperial and economic colonization by the Chinese, the Spanish, and the Americans.

All of the sudden, I felt the vast tragedy of the sundering and destruction of cultures that is an inherent of conquest. We are quite closely related to Indonesians and Malaysians, and even to Madagascarians, and I knew nothing of these cultures. It was a little like when I discovered, after 18 years, that I had a half-brother that we never talked about. Or like meeting my cousins in the Philippines for the first time in 20 years.

And a lot of weird cultural idiosyncracies totally clicked into place.

For example, I was always puzzled by the tendency of those in the generation before me to dichotomize everything. To label and categorize. To place ideas and people into various cubbyholes, and making the illusion that life was neat and tidy.

Then I learned about the importance of boundaries in Southeast Asian culture.

While you might easily lay blame on the Spanish and American colonizers, who brought along their own tradition of Manichaeistic dualism, however deeply repressed, there are precedents in our substrate culture.

The animistic beliefs of our ancestors (beliefs which were common throughout all of Southeast Asia before the advent of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Catholicism. They are also similar to beliefs of Native Americans and of the Celts, beliefs which are often referred to as paganism) were based on the notion of boundaries. To have security and safety, you had to categorize all things properly, and you had to avoid crossing boundaries. On the flip side, those things that existed where boundaries merged and became ambiguous were, while dangerous, things of great power. (Some simple examples are the tide, where sea and land meet, and the horizon, where sea and sky meet.) And we also come to the notion of the babaylan. While some theorize that the babaylan was typically a woman, and was basically the spiritual center of the a community, akin to the witch doctor or the medicine man, another version I’ve heard is that the babaylan tended to be of ambiguous gender (and that, supposedly, bakla is a corrupted form of the word babaylan.)Another related anecdote, which I have no way of verifying, is that supposedly only women and gay men are traditionally allowed to play the kulintang, implying some sort of sacredness inherent in the kulintang.) Needless to say, the babaylan was expunged by the Spanish, and we easily thereafter succumbed to alien ways of thinking.

It is sort of interesting to try to rationalize what sort of impact colonization had on our ancestors’ collective psyche, of how they might have tried to fit it into this cosmogeny of the importance of creating distinct boundaries and categories. One might theorize that the fact that many of us are stuck with binary thinking is merely a manifestation of our feelings of powerlessness. Maybe some of us are resigned to the inability to tap the energy inherent in things which are ambiguous, in places where the boundaries fall apart. But, on the other hand, this could just be revisionist mythology and wishful thinking.

(revised from ”The meaning of syllables”)

In college, one of the guys who held a little teaching session on baybayin espoused this theory that the graphemes actually have ideographic meanings, in the same way that Chinese characters (and hence, moreso with the Japanese kanji which borrow from them) have intrinsic meanings that don’t necessarily exactly correlate with their phonetic meanings.

I was kind of skeptical of the idea, and became more so as I learned about the evolution of the Phoenician abjad into the Brāhmī scripts of which Sanskrit and Devenagari are descendants, and from which it is theorized that the Austronesian abugadas are also derived.

But back to the idea. Supposedly, certain syllables have an inherent meaning outside of their purely phonetic meaning. So, for example “ba,” which to some look like a pair of breasts, denotes femininity, while “la,” which looks like a phallus, denotes masculinity. The supporting anecdote that is often cited for this is the fact that babae means woman and lalake means man. Other examples abound, although the only other one I can think of is the explanation of “ka.” I have been told that “ka” is supposed to connote a relationship, used to illustrate a connection. Hence, words like kapatid, kasama, kaibigan, katipunan, and on and on. Others which I remember are “ta” suggesting energy or the act of creation and “ha” reminiscent of current or flux. Unfortnately, I can’t remember any convincing examples of this.

It seems plausible that baybayin is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, just like the Roman alphabet is. Baybayin comes from the Eastern branch, while the Roman alphabet comes from the Western branch. I find this holds some merit because the Brāhmī scripts seem most likely derived from Phoenician scripts, and both baybayin and kana are quite probably derivatives of Brāhmī scripts. (In the case of Japan, this makes sense, as the script probably went along with the religion of Buddhism.) Hence “ba” is probably related to “beth,” which in Phoenician means house. (After all, whle “ba” may look like breasts, but it also looks like a sideways “b” or “beta”) And “la” is from “lamed,” which is a Phoenician ox-goad, i.e., a sharp object used to poke an ox to make it go forward, often also useful as a weapon. Notice that “la” looks a lot like a kris. (Do you think the people of Mindanao originally used the kris to goad their caribao?)

I can see some other similarities between shapes too—though my derivations may be spurious and are dubious at best. For example, “sa” seems to be easily derived from Phoenician “sin,” “ta” looks just like a stylized “t,” “da”—which at least in Tagalog can also be pronounced as “ra”—from either/or Phoenician “daleth” meaning door (which became Greek “delta”) or Phoenician “resh” meaning head. Both “daleth” and “resh” feature a triangular shape. (Hence the other meanings of “delta”) And while “da” is an open shape, it still essentially has three elements to it. Also, while “na” does not look very related to Roman “n,” it bears some semblance to Phoenician “nun,” meaning fish. But that’s pretty much all I could come up with.

In any case, if you subscribe to the theory of meaning embedded in the symbol, some people have come up with some interesting formulas. For example, writing bakla out as “ba-ka-la” illustrates the feminine joined with the masculine. Even bathala (which can be written out as “ba-ta-ha-la”) shows this duality (while throwing in “ta” for creation and “ha” for flux as good measure.) Another place where you can find “ba” and “la” is Cebuano balaanon, meaning, I think, holy, sacred.

I doubt this will ever be proven one way or the other, but I still find it interesting to ponder.

Ang hindi marunong magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa ang amoy sa bulok at mabahong isda — Jose Rizal (Anyone who doesn’t know how to love their own language is worse than the smell of a rotten, stinky fish)

Alibata (or, for a more indigenous term, baybayin) is a name for the ancient writing system used in the Philippines before the Spanish Conquest, and is related to the various abugida systems used in much of Southeast Asia at the time.

Before I was introduced to alibata, I had been trying to learn J.R.R. Tolkien’s tengwar, which is an abjad system, and thus is quite similar to an abugida in that diacritical marks are used to indicate (certain) vowels. The only difference is that an individual grapheme in an abjad without diacritics stands for a single consonant phoneme, whereas an individual grapheme in an abugida without diacritics stands for a consonant-vowel syllable.

So when my girlfriend-at-the-time found this old Filipino History textbook by Gregorio Zaide (whose references were quite suspect, seeing as how it referred to the Code of Kalantiaw as historical fact, and apparently teaching that the Creation Myth in Genesis is also historical fact), I was completely enthralled by alibata, and quickly learned how to use it.

Baybayin was the rage in college amongst us Filipino Americans, and I found myself eventually giving workshops, and teaching other people how to use it. I would even end up coming up with mock-ups of tatoos that people wanted of alibata. Those were fun times.

In my senior year in college, I took a linguistics class on ancient writing systems, and so I ended up writing my final paper on alibata, which I eventually transcribed to a website.

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Eventually, I was invited to a Yahoo Group whose topic was supposedly the discussion of Baybayin and other aspects of indigenous Filipino culture. Neat. I don’t remember when I first signed up, but my first post was in January 2003, regarding the meaning and origin of the word diwa.

Initially, it was pretty stimulating, and it was neat to meet people who have a scholarly background in linguistics such as Professor Lawrence Reid and Paul Morrow. There used to be a lot of people in the group, and we touched upon a lot of subjects, such as the continued colonial mentality that seems to prevail in both Filipino and Filipino American culture, and the end-result of the imperial subjugation of the Philippines. It is disturbing to see how the American colonization of the Philippines has quite a bit in common with the U.S. misadventure in Vietnam, and with the current debacle in Iraq. They weren’t kidding about history repeating itself.

And then there were the trolls.

I can tell you, working nights is not particularly conducive to mental well-being. Especially when nearly everyone you meet is somewhat insane as it is, and a good number of them are just completely crazy.

Man. I’m really tired.

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The question at point, really, is where do I go now? What direction must I set my heart, however old, corrupted, and unseaworthy it is.

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Warrior offer food badly. Losing conscious rapidly.

My cousin J™ [1][2] loves this crap:

You scored as Raven, Raven 92% Bear 67% Dolphin 67% Serpent 58% Tiger 50% Fox 42% Wolf 17% Deer 17% If you were an animal… Wich would you be? created with QuizFarm.com

I’ve always identified with the trickster god.

When an ex-girlfriend read Wuthering Heights, she told me that Heathcliff reminded her of me. (I have also reminded diverse people of Sidney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities.)

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. —A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

I’ve always wondered if Michael Penn was alluding to Wuthering Heights in his song ”No Myth”

How fitting. The medical student who became a revolutionary.

Apparently I’ve missed my calling. Although it isn’t that off. I suppose this just reflects my enduring INTP‘ishness (although I’ve been—somewhat fittingly—scoring as an INFP as of late) I kind of do get obsessed with complex, multivariable systems, where you can make small manipulations that can cascade into tremendous branching reactions, some of which can be self-sustaining and gain a life of their own. Mad science, son! Mad science!

It’s past 4:30 am and I really, really, <em>really</em> should go to sleep.

But <em>noooo</em>.  I’m letting the Internet eat my life instead.

No one makes sense at 4 am, I tell ya. This is the perfect time to make promises you don’t intend to keep.

You can always blame it on being drunk. Or tired.

(Can you believe it? I’m <em>not</em> drunk!)

My mind is scrambled. I have no idea what to do next.

Temporizing. Procrastinating. Wasting time.

Damn it.

Wow. This story has actually hit the mainstream media. The BBC notes that people are paranoid about all that personal information embedded in the DRM-free songs offered on the iTunes Music Store.

What’s the big deal? If you’re not going to pirate the songs, no one is going to have access to this information. And if you are going to pirate these songs, it seems pretty trivial to remove this information.