October « 2005 « ThePanda

October 23, 2005

Weirdness

Filed under: article, hope for the future — aurojit @ 11:28 pm

Perhaps I should not be typing this, perhaps I should not be doing any of the things I have been spending time on this weekend, wait I didn’t actually spend time on much of anything, perhaps I should spend time on things which are not much of anything, perhaps I should stop saying perhaps… I am tired, I am truly and utterly tired, and I am annoyed about things too numerous to list, I seem to be one of the all time greatest sources of humor at this point of time, being laughed at for some of what annoys me, and umm charging penguins are kind of included in that list, me being weird and all. I have stuff on order from Amazon, and I really wish people stopped attributing attributes to me at this point in time. I need to work on my topology midterm, which though not hard is still doing a really good job of making me feel stupid. A lot of things have been doing a good job of that this semester, might have something or nothing to do with everything that is weird in the world. I turn 20 in two days, it’s no different from when I turned 18 or 19, or any of those other big numbers after school, well a little is different, last year I was at college for the first time, I was hoping exciting things would happen, this time I am sort of resigned to the fact that it will be another day, perhaps even a weird one like it was last year. I want to see Lion King, which is playing downtown, but I don’t want to go alone, since a) it is not fun to do so, b) it is safer to go with people, c) it is cheap enough that money is not an excuse for most, d) I do not know what most people’s excuse is, and e) because I am not sure I want to spend that much money on seeing an off-broadway broadway show alone. I also want it to snow, seeing as the days are short and it is chilly already, snow would at least make the world around white, sort of nice, I guess, I don’t know, perhaps also because it would give me an excuse to wear my winter coat, which at present seems like an overkill.

I had an interview with Apple last Thursday, funny how few people know about this, well I don’t know, at that time it just felt like another one of those things I should perhaps try to do, in hopes of being able to prove something, and now it seems like a good idea to hope that I actually get the job. Why would I want that, I am not sure, Caltech, which is where I have wanted to be in the summer seems to make more sense, but seeing that as of now I know absolutely no one in the math department that seems to be one of the plans which is going to fall by the wayside. We discussed parts of this at my interview, how so many of the things I seem to have started fall by the wayside, the OS of long ago featured prominently in my discussions. Interviewers are a funny set of people, most of them are polite, hard to decipher individuals, me and IAN both walked out of the interview feeling befuddled, and yet we cannot share the same fate in that interview, umm well perhaps we can, it just seems strangely improbable.

I need to do topology, I need to stop typing this, perhaps I am going to do that, minimize both this and the window I am writing a story in. Oh people should visit David Lanham, he seems to have really cool background images, or well it is my belief that he has really good desktop backgrounds, and seeing as I have taken to using his pictures as backgrounds I feel it is appropriate that I plug for him. Time to do some of that topology thing, though I am sure I will be back to writing more before I am done, perhaps even before I am done with one additional question…

So that came true, I write this before I am done with one question, perhaps because I received a call and was forced to take it, such being the requirements of calls from home, though I hardly mean to complain about them, they are rare enough, and are somewhat entertaining. Assumptions loom across the world, they are funny things, assumptions that is, everyone makes a few about everyone, I don’t think anyone quite realizes how many things people assume about them, this includes me, but then I think it is simpler to not assume what people assume about me. As TRB once mentioned on one of our walks, back when they still used to happen, assuming is bad, it makes an ass of you and me. Hmm talking about walks, this is perhaps one of the first weekends in a few weeks when I have not walked out and gone on a walk because of sheer inability to understand what exactly being social entails in that particular case. Funny thing being social is, what do you do when someone who hasn’t IMed you in like forever IMs you again, and you are engaged in some deep thought, pause thoughts and answer IM, or ignore the IM and be antisocial, instant messaging, computers, and cellphones have started to pervade my sense of what being social is. The other day, I was told by one of my coworkers that the next generation of computers was going to be on a cellphone, I am not quite sure about how I should react to this development, sure I love computers and can’t actually imagine surviving school or the lack thereof in the absence of one, and every time I tell someone that I don’t really know how to repair their computer, the sadness they show, and the sadness I feel assures me that they are probably the same way, and yet I don’t like the idea of cellphones as computers. My cellphone can already do a billion gazillion things I don’t need for it to, I am not sure I’d want to leave my Powerbook and shift to a cellphone. Perhaps I am no longer cool enough, a parent hinted at this last weekend. I had this person randomly call me at the help desk, and while I was trying to sort his problems out, he began to tell me about how he had programmed stuff for Statistics Canada in Fortran, “back in the day”, and how no one knew about Fortran these days, well someone clearly does, for I do, I have seen Fortran code, I know what made it good for things, and things it sucked at, I don’t like it, but I know of it, and perhaps that really is freakish, this despite the fact that I heard of it in early 1998 in my dad’s lab, while it was being used on what was perhaps state of the art in terms of machine capabilities back then…

I was just told that the fact that someone I know well’s understanding why I compare beds and hard drives is sad. I am still to figure out whether this is because the theory itself is weird, whether because it is geekish, or whether because such a statement automatically implies less than optimal roomkeeping on both of our parts, not sure… We have too much ice cream in this house, which is a good thing for ice cream is good, but bad because a lot of it is owned by people and no one cares to eat any of it, since it is labeled, and that in itself leads to limited amounts of space for keeping more ice cream, thus leading to a weird situation of wanting to buy ice cream so that I could eat it later, and not buying ice cream so the freezer would have space for more important things, ice trays for instance… I bought brie earlier this week, good cheese is good… I use a lot of ‘I’s in these entries, a recent conscious attempt at comparing these values with past conversations seems to indicate the incident rate of ‘I’s is much higher in these entries. This could of course be a result of skewed data dynamics because I kept track of the number of ‘I’s thus screwing up one of the sample spaces, it could also be because these are supposed to compensate for me screaming at certain people, myself for instance…

It is going to be National Novel Writing Month in another 8 days, as my source for such information recently assured me, the month is actually a lot more international than the name would imply. Funny, I have never heard of such a month while back home, though that could be because novel writing was not a big thing amongst my circle of friends. Speaking of circle of friends, what’s with those few people who were “keeping in touch” with me, like has everyone just decided to disappear, ‘coz honestly I couldn’t care less, I have too much work, and this suits me fine, but any cribbing about my disappearance over the winter shall not make me happy…

I just did stuff on my Topology test that made me sort of happy, though there’s lot more stuff to do, so I don’t know how happy I should be. Bah, happiness is weird, it prevents me from doing more work, no wait, it prevents me from doing some of the work I should be doing. Funny, I really haven’t done that much that has been enjoyable this weekend, and yet I have not gotten through too big a proportion of my work. And it’s been raining most of the weekend, cold uncomfortable rain that necessitates the wearing of fleeces and jackets, funny as that is… I wish I took some of the things that concern me more seriously, I wish less people thought I was more intelligent than them, and hence shied away from helping me, oh and I wish I had applied for the fiction writing deadline, I sort of wanted to take that class, bah, missing deadlines…

I might take a seminarish cognitive science class next semester, I am not quite sure why, but I feel like I should, it’s one of those things which I find interesting, and have yet to have taken, and it’s a seminar, so it could potentially be fun. Besides the instructor is another person from the land of the kangaroos, and the last person from the land of the kangaroos was awesomely fun. I am going to be around all of tomorrow, and I want to do work while I am around, and having this lying around is not conducive to sleep, and I should go sleep, soon… The clocks change over soon, which means one of these days I’ll have one less hour to do anything in, this is not fair, there is no reason why anyone, especially someone like Benjamin Franklin should conspire to steal an hour from my already over crowded day, I never conspired to steal things from him, or anyone else…

I need to go sleep, this needs to go online, these requirements are not analogous, but they need to happen…

Ze Panda
Dreaming about weirder things…

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October 12, 2005

Penguins

Filed under: Penguins, hope for the future — aurojit @ 10:29 pm

This was in response to a conversation about Tux and everything else I had yesterday, written late last night, long past when I should have gone to sleep, mostly because I was anoyed by people’s willingness to accept the idea of an angry penguin, it is incomplete and should be considered a work in progress as such.

I may or may not add more to this, I kind of liked the idea…

No penguins were hurt in the making of this entry.

Any resmeblance to any penguins, dead or alive is a figment of your imagination

This is not a good place to find factual information about penguins, might I suggest such things as wikipedia and H2G2. The world is far too naive to accept the reality about penguins

Being a penguin is strange, well somewhat strange anyways. No it is not the bad kind of strange, not the kind of strange which causes butterflies in people’s bellies, to paraphrase that weird human saying, nor the kind which makes you hope the fish did not all run away in search of greener pastures up north, though that is always something you have to fear. As that great penguin Empurus 1 had said many millenia ago, the fittest are the ones who survive. Oh how we wish no one had told that stupid human anything about our philosophies, would have prevented many strifes in certain countries, would have been far more entertaining to watch. No being a penguing is a strange kind of strange, perhaps what you humans, for whom after all this is intended, would call weirdly strange, or that could be a reflection about the kind of language a certain subkind of humans like to use. Sure you look at us, you see us waddling around, doing belly flops (whatever those are, I overheard the term being used in one of those big metal containers your species calls ships, which had come around with another huge group of people so they could gawk at us), “entertaining” you, and you are proud of all those penguins you have in London, Washington DC, Helsinki, and all those other zoos around the world, but like seriously, do you have any idea how expensive it is for one of us to actually find acomodations in those filthy, hot places you call “cities,” and cool such accomodation down to tempratures we can live in, like what’s up with all of you ape and your warm living climates, you are not filthy reptiles, our ancestors already made the leap away from cold bloodedness, cooler climes are so much easier to survive than warmer ones, and don’t even make the energy argument , like what’s up with that, can’t you Homo sapiens, people who think you are the greatest beings of them all generate enough energy to keep yourself alive in winters.

It is all quite funny… People watch us waddle, we watch people gawk, similar effects, the waddling is more fun for us, like what’s with all of those people walking in stiff calculated steps, we can do that, but it’s not nearly half as fun as say walking around our way, or sliding on our bellies, oooh sliding on bellies is fun, good thing we don’t let the young do it, like I can imagine some of those kids, inspired by punk fish, and those weird adults who never grew up, sliding on ice caps which are about to break off, and doing so at immense speeds. I have to admit, I have always been a big fan of speed, but like umm, it’s hard to explain, I know where to slow down, I don’t bump into the other penguins, though I do remember the embarassing accident me and Soink II had all those days ago, when we were both young, and lost in dreams of all those things we could do. Soink II’s in London now, living in that thing you call a zoo, and we call a “human observatory”, observing humans is really quite fun, though I doubt maintaining camouflage gives Soink II much of a chance to slide around, hmm we could pull them out of the observatory, we do that every few years, it’s not like most humans know much about how to recognize our kind, and their minds are so flooble, malleable, changed with the slightest ease, all we need to do is tap in, and woohoo they are changed.

Ooh the human communication device seems to show a picture of a nice penguin sitting on his hind, like what’s wrong with you people, don’t your metal containers observe enough of us we don’t sit on our tush, which is another one of those freakish words your species seems to have been using, no we waddle, we sit on our feet, and we slide on our bellies, like what’s wrong with you people, what the hell is wrong with you.

I guess we really can’t complain though, it would be kind of boring without all those people to entertain us, the strange colors (the bright ones are really cool, black and white, and people who dress like us are just plain old stupid… You cannot confuse us, we do actually know you look nothing like us, and umm your faces similar to ours, your ancestor’s gave up on the beak, bad idea, fish is good for you, eat more of that, and you might actually have better brains.

So yes coming back to the reasons for my communique, like earlier today I was at this thing you people probably call a dining place, awful food and all, no fish, smelt like it had never seen any fresh fish, and had weird food, not the kind of food supposedly intelligent things on two legs should be eating, but anyways, there were these people discussing penguin charges. Now before you fall flat on your face laughing, which was what most of those humans did, every now and then you mindless beings do manage to annoy us enough that we want to cause harm without resorting to technology, like sure zapping a few of your brain cells would be simple, but would require that we waddle down under the ice cap, find our ray gun, and only then zap you, but you know there are all those supposedly intelligent, actually dumb humans who just don’t get it, don’t understand that they are not wanted around, and there’s only so much any self-respecting penguin can take. Like honestly, those people who come trouble us on those warm islands, barely cold enough to survive, like what the hell are we supposed to do, we are trying to make the best of a bad situation and then some weird ape comes by and tries to take advantage of your attempts at being nice. And then there is the famous story which made some of your kind aware of how angry we can get, yes one of us did attack one of your self-important boneheads, what can we say, he was being a bonehead, invading our privacy and all, yes one of us did waddle and belly slide after him, pretending to attack him, it was mostly a warning, but it had to be done, we do not like wars, but it had to be done…

In the way of the world, there are dolphins, and there are us, and then there are the bloody mice. Now no matter what anyone, esecially those stupid cats you seem to own, tells you, mice are the things you should be scared by, they mean no good, they are not evil, but they are scientists, crazy multi-dimensional ones, as one of your great writers, man named Dooglas Adammm, or something to that order, did actually write about this (yes we have translators working on your books, we need to monitor sources of information, and spread disinformation to protect our secrets), but that might have been the result of one too many pan-galactic gargle blaster on a road trip through Europe, and a mice having a few of those, but like he did give you warning of such things.

It’s interesting how much humans laugh at danger, tell them about charging penguins, researching mice, scheming vogons, and all they do is laugh. Not like we do much of anything else, but we laugh at everything, we laugh at matters of importance, because there is little else we can do, we try and avoid them, but as a black and white waddly thing, it’s not like we can go up to one of you humans and ask you to stop doing things, and umm within ourselves, we can settle things, it is simple, don’t like someone, just put them on a break away ice-cap, and they’ll go away, never to trouble you away, that is fun, and it solves problems, and they get to find other fish to eat. Fish, as I stated earlier, is good.

So are all of this Adammses persons sayings true, no not really, he has heard of the Vogons, and he has heard of the mice, most of us, even humans, are multidimensional in one way or the other. See we are not flat, so we live in at least three dimensions, and the 11 or more curled up dimensions in the universe sort of force us to exist in all of them, it is fun, kind of anyways. Penguins do not try imagining the 8 dimensions we are intimately aware of, it is sort of mind bogling, and the few who have tried to in the past have gone completely and utterly insane, not inexplicably so, low dimensional topology is strange enough for most penguins (the kind called normal, they don’t consider me normal, I don’t think they consider most of the world normal), 8 dimensions is not fun. It is to an extent because of all those damn reptiles that we are stuck with this problem, well actually it is the mice, they were scared about people/creatures in the future realizing that the mice were upto no good, and thus not allowing them observation options. The vogons are not as bad as he makes them out to be, some vogon poetry is really good, most of it isn’t. But that I guess is true about all poetry, like Penguin poetry, such a large amount of it is about fish and terns, that you’d think anyone who could express a half sensible sentence about fishes or terns for that matter is a poet, but we all know this cannot be true.

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