What I did today

I discovered a typography joke embedded in the very grammar of the Slovak tongue.

So, there's a rule, which I will call The Vowel Lengthening Rule, in which the last vowel of a word becomes longer. This rule only applies to one noun case: the genitive plural. So if the word is a different noun case, such as locative or genitive singular, the rule does not apply.

There's a second rule, which I will call The Great Slovak Vowel Shift Rule, in which some (but not all!) lengthened vowels get raised in height. So, e and o (both high-mid vowels) go to i and u (high vowels), and æ (a low-mid vowel) goes to i as well.

Now, it's really easy to explain these as two rules. But they kind of occur in the same place at the same time, which often means they can be explained with a single rule!

*time elapses*

Oh, hm. I tried combining them into one rule and it turned out really complicated and bad. I wonder why? Why can't I stick the Great Slovak Vowel Shift Rule into the Lengthening Rule?

You can't shift within the lengthening rule because it's case-sensitive.

Going through my notes from last year, found this picture

Sannakji - Sam broadens his culinary horizons.

I had originally planned to go to Mindshare LA tonight with some friends, but that fell through because you have to be 21 to enter and we are not 21. Tragic! So, change of plans. We went to Masan, a really authentic Korean joint, and ordered live octopus tentacles.



Sannakji is the Korean answer to the age-old question, "what's the best way to squick out foreigners with food?" And you know what? It's pretty tasty, and it's a lot of fun to eat. It's probably 100 times better with alcohol, which explains why the Masan menu was about equal parts food options and liquor options. I cannot wait to come back to this place when I'm of drinkin' age and load up on soju before octopus consumption.

The little tentacle segments continued to wriggle in a lively fashion for upwards of 20 minutes, crawling off of the chopsticks and suction-cupping themselves to everything--plates, tongues, teeth, even upper lips:



Yep, that's me wearing a wiggly octo-stache and making the creepiest face I could muster. I feel a little bad about insulting Korean culinary culture with my white-boy antics, but it's impossible not to play with your food if the food wants to play with you!

A post about cake that is not on my cake blog?

Okay, backstory. Long time ago, I learned about a cake called torta tre monti, a cake from the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. From the Wikipedia article on the cake: "It is similar to other layered desserts common to San Marino, this one being representative of The Three Towers of San Marino."

I misinterpreted this sentence. You see, I thought it meant the torta tre monti actually resembled a geographical formation, like a topo map. That is an exciting prospect, because San Marino is a jagged, mountainous land, and a cake that looks like this would be pretty badass:

Source: http://brianakira.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/september-3rd-will-mark-the-1707th-anniversary-of-the-worlds-first-christian-state/

Tragically, that is not the case! The cake actually looks like this:

Source: http://www.laserenissima.sm/torta_tre_monti_caffe.asp

That is not a cool looking cake! It's probably tasty, but it's not topographical at all! Something had to be done. Something...excessive.





That is my torta tre monti, the result of four days of labor. It covers all of San Marino and a chunk of Italy that surrounds it. Each gradation is 20 meters higher than the one before it, with the highest one being 700 meters. I didn't get the lines from a geological survey or anything; I stitched together screenshots from Google Maps (terrain mode) and traced them by hand using my trackpoint mouse.

(That's a point of pride. I did all this with a trackpoint. You are not allowed to complain about my trackpoint use.)

Trouble is, I don't know what to do from here. If I want an actual topographical cake, how should I do it? I can make a negative image and mill that, to use as a cake pan; I could do the whole thing with a RepRap and a Frostruder; I could cut out wafers in the shape of each layer, and glue them together with chocolate, like in the original! I could also change what area I use for the actual cake! I could use the whole rectangle there, or just the boundaries of the nation of San Marino, or just Monte Titano. I could make so many cakes.

I'll supply the files to anyone who asks, by the way.

Foodie followup

So, in two earlier posts I professed my desires to eat real wasabi and breadfruit. Well, last night, I got to eat both. Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Hon-wasabi: Served in the same paste-blob as regular wasabi paste, the hon-wasabi had a darker green color and more fibrous bits floating around. The taste was remarkably similar to plain ol' wasabi paste, but with noticeable sweet, floral overtones that made the whole thing so fantastic. I almost ate the whole lump.

Breadfruit: The breadfruit was served in a mash, like potatoes. Perhaps this is part of the reason why I thought it tasted the same as sweet potato. Anyway, I continue to hold that breadfruit would taste different if prepared differently, so I need to perform more tests somehow.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Inflatable sound visualizer

I got the inspiration for this when I went to Tulsa to see CAKE and Gogol Bordello live in concert. Oh yeah! I saw CAKE and Gogol Bordello live in concert! Woooooo!

woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Anyway, one of the other bands I saw was The Uglysuit, whose stage decoration involved simply putting a huge black tarp over all the junk behind the drummer (Why was there all that junk on the stage anyway?). It was a windy day, and as the wind blew, the tarp would billow, inflating and deflating almost in time with the beat. Almost.

But it would totally be possible to create that effect intentionally, and in time with the music! It would need an inflater, like those used in bouncy houses, with some computer control system. The control system is needed in order to ascertain the rhythm of the song and time the inflation/deflation appropriately. You could try it with a cruder system where inflater-activity and volume are directly proportional, but then the visual effect would have a delay effect and that would just look weird.

Speed Metal Cuckoo Clock

Oh yes. The title says it all. Here's a cutaway view of what I'm envisioning:



I don't trust myself with fine clockwork mechanisms and all, so this is a primarily electromechancial thing. You know, servos and microprocessors and all. The two pucks in the top are continuous-rotation servos. At a chosen time, one rotates the outer track such that Guitar Man is outside; then, the other servo gets the inner track rotating. The bumps on the inner track make the Guitar Man's guitar wiggle or make his head bob. A speaker in the lower cabinet plays speed metal. The square thing in the back is some processor that controls the clock, the servos, and the speaker. Oh man you guys this is so cool so coooooooool.

Ethan R. is in cahoots on this one. He's got the greatest ideas here.

First idea of my return: popcorn kernel things

We all know how popcorn pops. I don't have to go into that.

Here's a popcorn kernel:


When it's going to pop, who knows where that rupture line is going to be? Not you, that's for sure. But what if we could control the popping location?

I propose a suit of armor, with a little hole in it. The armor, which could be an electroplated metal coat or a thick layer of plaster or something, will force the kernel to pop at the little hole, creating mushroom-cloud-shaped popcorn. Hooray!

I'm back!

Hey guys, I might start posting things here. Not on a MWF schedule or nothing, just whenever I feel like it. I'll start repopulating this place with my wacky ideas and terrible stories. You know, a repository of things for when I feel like explaining something to someone but I don't feel like typing the entire story for the umpteenth time.

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

THE BLOG IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BLOG

If you couldn't figure it out already, I'm not going to update this anymore. I'm not out of super-awesome ideas or anything, it's just that I've gone back to raving at anyone and everyone in person. So no more blag. Take care, Internet!

Hey guys, it's been a while.

Well, I screwed up the light-capturing rig so it ended up not charging the mini-capacitor-bank. But this doesn't mean it shouldn't work! It just means I'm fallible. Hey look, a distraction!



I could amuse myself with this for days.

We can't break the laws of entropy but we sure can cheat them a little bit! I don't understand why a solar panel taking light from a light bulb to power the same lightbulb is a bad idea. Sure, it's not a perpetual energy device, but it's more efficient than without the solar cell. And we're all about efficiency nowadays, aren't we? I'm setting up a proof-of-concept solar capacitor charger right now and I'll make a blag post with photos later.

For those of you who've played Sonic Adventure 2: Battle

Has anyone else noticed that Rouge the Bat is a little...jiggly? Not in the stereotypical video-game-female-jiggle manner, though--Rouge's bust is as unmoving and chaste as a bronzed nun (which is probably for the best, seeing as it's a frigging BAT). No, it's her ears. They just don't stop moving. Ever. To me, that's way creepier than the visual image I just gave myself of dipping a nun in molten bronze.

Basically I just wanted an excuse to say "Bronzed nun." I think that's my best simile ever.

Fidel Castro

Holy hell, he just won't die. Fidel Castro is clearly a descendant of Rasputin. No, wait. Fidel Castro IS Rasputin.

***THIS IS A BREAK TO INDICATE A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SUBJECT. I AM AN EXCELLENT SEGUE-WRITER.***

Foodwatch 2007: Hour five. I'm fasting for Yom Kippur. I've never done it before so I don't know if I'll last until Saturday evening. I'll probably be hungry and cranky during the physics lab tomorrow afternoon, which will affect my results in interesting ways. I'll probably have things like V² = V₀² + SCRW YOU GUYS THIS SUCKESS. I can't wait!

h-diaeresis

We need a character for h with diaeresis. Well, there already is one (ḧ -- you might not have the right font to read that) but it's not in common use. Actually, it's not in use at all. Wikipedia acknowledges its existence but does not have an article nor mention any use for it. I would suggest it be used like ä ë ï ö and ü are used in English: namely, to indicate the start of a new syllable where it might be missed, like in naïve or coördinate.

There are many places where one could use an h-diaeresis! Take The Great Gatsby. There's a character named Wolfsheim. That's not pronounced WULF-shaim, it's pronounced WULFS-haim. Other words which could benefit from an h-diaeresis include the following: lighthearted, lightheaded, butthead, misheard, fathead, shepherd, lefthanded, and, of course, asshat. I've already started using h-diaeresis in my homework, but it's not that often that I get to use it. Maybe someone will notice eventually.

UshankaUshanka: Did I tell you my plan for Fiji?
bladez740: no
UshankaUshanka: Okay, some background info
UshankaUshanka: Fiji has had four--FOUR--military coups in the last 19 years
UshankaUshanka: Every one is because someone thought the current government was either a) too racist or b) not racist enough
UshankaUshanka: The majority of Fiji's population is Hindu descendants of Indian slaves, but the majority of the government and economy are controlled by native Fijians.
UshankaUshanka: So, in the most recent coup this February
UshankaUshanka: The army/police chief, who is in charge of EVERY FIREARM IN THE COUNTRY, noticed that of the 1000 tracts of land the government gave away that year, 997 of them went to native Fijians.
UshankaUshanka: "That's pretty racist!" he thought. "I have all the guns and all the soldiers in the country, I should do something about this!"
UshankaUshanka: So he drew up a list of his demands
UshankaUshanka: and gave them to the prime minister saying that he had three weeks to comply or else the military/police forces would rebel and take over.
UshankaUshanka: In other words, he gave three weeks' warning before staging a coup.
UshankaUshanka: They knew three weeks in advance that he was going to attack them. They had three weeks to prepare.
UshankaUshanka: And yet he still succeeded in taking over the country.
UshankaUshanka: But he's not much better
UshankaUshanka: like, lynching people and stuff
UshankaUshanka: So the way I see it, I should take over Fiji. It can't be too hard if you can stage a coup with three weeks' warning, right?
UshankaUshanka: I'll kick everyone out, deport them to Antarctica or something.
UshankaUshanka: And I won't let them back in until they can prove that they can play nice.

At long last!

I've been trying to read and translate a Spanish guidebook on Silbo Gomero for a while now. At long last, I've reached the part where it explains the mechanisms behind the identification of letters! Now I understand how to speak Silbo Gomero! The next problem is actually speaking Silbo Gomero.

Silbo is a whistled language, intended to be heard over a range of a couple miles. To generate a whistle loud enough to travel this distance, one has to use the "fingers-in-mouth" method. And boy is it difficult. All I've succeeded in doing so far is to hyperventilate and to cover my fingers in a film of slobber. I'm going to keep trying, so don't shake my hand for a couple of days, alright?

I've decided that I really want to visit the idyllic green lake seen in Hero, or some lake like it.

That's all I've got for tonight. I'm not really feeling the blaggy vibes.

A letter to Jamie Foxx

Dear Jamie Foxx,

I think you are a fine man and I respect your acting skills greatly, but I still cannot overlook something you did in 2005. The incident in question is one of the greatest disasters in cinematic history.

I am talking, of course, about your Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for your role as Max, the islophilic cab driver from Collateral. Now, don't get me wrong, I think you did a great job in that movie, but I do not believe you qualified as a "supporting actor." As I recall, you had more lines and more screen-time than any other cast member. This should classify you as the lead actor, should it not? How did you get into the supporting actor category?

I posit, Mr. Foxx, that you quite selfishly and purposefully demoted yourself to "supporting" actor so that you could have a shot at winning TWO Academy Awards in 2005. See, you had already been nominated for best actor for your role in Ray. If you were nominated for best actor twice, you could only win one award, but if you were nominated for both best actor AND best supporting actor, you had a shot at a second award! Fortunately for easily-angered people like myself, you did not win your second award--had you been voted best supporting actor, I may have had an aneurysm.

I've suffered in silence long enough, Mr. Foxx. Every time I have seen or heard your name, I remember this gross abuse of power, and it pains me greatly. What with The Kingdom coming out soon, I don't think I could have survived much longer without telling you of my great dissatisfaction.

Regards,
Sam "Captain Awesome" Ettinger
Semiprofessional bellyacher

Hon-Wasabiiiiiiiii

So, after hours of laborious research, I've found hon-wasabi for sale from the kiwi-mafia of New Zealand. I get 50 grams of dried, powdered hon-wasabi for $13.55 including shipping, or 150 grams for $25.50. Those are US Dollars, not NZ Dollars. That's really, really, REALLY expensive for a food additive. I'm going to finance all of this if I have to, but if someone out there wants to pay for part of this I promise you'll get a generous ratio.

This is kind of exciting. If the dried, powdered hon-wasabi tastes good, I may have to shell out the $300 to get a fresh, intact rhizome. Mmmmm, my mouth is burning already.