fluid when shaken, stirred or otherwise disturbed

collage

by kareninagonzales

my fridge magnets have never looked so hot

posted by thixotropic @ 5:11 PM 0 comments

its really happening, with dates and everything

is this more like a transplant, or a repotting? i mean, i really love brooklyn and all, but am, or was, i pot-bound?

um, yeah.

sorry for the cheesy use of plant metaphors - but it was gonna happen sooner or later, and this is as good a time as any?

i am also now taking suggestions...

posted by thixotropic @ 11:43 PM 4 comments

business trips

are strange journeys; i approach them with about as much enthusiasm as a trip to the dentist. especially when first a gaggle of teenagers holds up your flight for an hour, only to then sit on the runway for another hour waiting for some thunderstorms to clear through; and then the hotel bed just sucks and you wake up aching like you'd been hit by a train - all to give a ten minute presentation so that folks know you as the girl from nyc who does that tree stuff.

and of course, to have people from last year's meeting come up and say that they missed me at the bar last night (my absence due to the aforementioned teenager/thunderstorm interaction) in my role as the queen of drunken shuffleboard. so would that go on a resume under special skills? i wonder.

posted by thixotropic @ 12:57 AM 1 comments

PET scan voyeurism

a study has found a new way to figure out if she's faking it, if you happen to have a PET scanner or two lying around the house:

The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: simply resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner’s fingers, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm.

The results of the study are striking. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex.

...[The] study also revealed clear differences when women were faking an orgasm. Part of the brain involved controlling conscious movement lit up, and there was none of the extreme deactivation [seen during orgasm].

from new scientist via pure pedantry

and as for the boys, apparently for them it all happens so quickly that the changes in brain activity cannot be measured - PET scanners just aren't precise enough yet. so it will be a while before us grrls would know if this book is worth the paper it is printed on

bodies:brains

posted by thixotropic @ 12:17 AM 0 comments

web presentations and dating

apparently, everyone dates through the web, even jesus:

Golden-haired, blue-eyed Jesus seeks loving young woman (22-30), preferably of recent Norse-Germanic heritage, who wishes to live in the spirit of the eternal. Innocence, or rebirth into innocence, and a desire to transcend the material mendacity of this world are essential!

...Prospective respondents should read 1 John 4:18. True to artistic depictions, I have a lean swimmer's body and a six-pack, and if you have sought your best in life you will also be in good shape.

many thanks to m

don't swimmers shave off all their body hair? i wonder how much the beard and hair affects the laminar flow of the the holy stroke.

church:dates

posted by thixotropic @ 8:35 PM 2 comments

not just for stalking [insert name of person you're obsessing over here] anymore

friendster is not just for looking up your high school buddies, stalking your ex-[affiliation], or simple booty hunting anymore...

[The] National Security Agency ...is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.

...[The paper] reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

...What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. ...ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community"

...The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office

via new scientist

so i suppose they weren't disruptive before... ?

on a happier note, i didn't miss my lilies blooming after all. pictures can be seen by clicking on that nifty flash flickr thing on the right.

metadata:expose yourself

posted by thixotropic @ 12:41 PM 0 comments

two brothers

there are few family decision-making moments that are as intense as what happens when we go out together to 飲茶 - which translated literally, means "drink tea" - but actually connotes going out for a dim sum lunch. "lunch" is actually 午餐, which when broken down into its component characters, are "noon" and "meal".

anyways. this is my dad+uncle deliberating over the order - and my dad finally figuring out that he's meant to fill in the bubbles rather than checking them off - think of the scan sheets for the SATs. at least this time the scanner was accurate!

dim sum:family

posted by thixotropic @ 7:29 AM 0 comments

don't eat potatoes after using them as a battery

this potato battery makes me think that the barely-held-back oil and energy crisis could turn out as something like a global potato famine. since hey, we eat our oil anyways.

Farming [is] an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

...[The] methods of the green revolution...added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

...Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten.

An oldie but goodie from harpers

a nice example of diminishing returns, yes?

batteries:famine

posted by thixotropic @ 9:40 AM 0 comments

the importance of documenting methodology

i'm almost not even sure what to say about this. it is definitely a nice example of science writing - concise methodology, clearly presented results, with a short discussion of possible mechanisms and even some citations.

Update: the embedded movie was fucking up the page so i took it out. go here to see the video this post refers to!

via andrew

posted by thixotropic @ 6:03 PM 0 comments

exercise your demons

saturday:booty

posted by thixotropic @ 10:03 AM 0 comments

preening on the cheap

built by wendy sample sale!

discounts:
Wrangler47 jeans were $126, now $50
cotton tops were $135, now $65
bermuda shorts were $100, now $50 (and please don't do the cowboy boots bermuda shorts thing!)
etc etc etc

friday+saturday 11am to 8pm
46 north 6th st, x streets wythe and kent, williamsburg.

consumption:vanity

posted by thixotropic @ 6:07 AM 0 comments