There's something fishy going on

Today I discovered a very neat horrible invasion of privacy. There is a group on LiveJournal called Project Upstream, which scans livejournal and various other sites (deviantart and such) for AIM screen names, and then randomly starts conversations with each of them, impersonating the other with a screen name that ends with Salmon, Trout or Coho  So, for example I had a conversation that looked like this:

LittleLeagueCoho: Hey.
Me: Hello.
LittleLeagueCoho: To whom am I speaking?
Me: I think it is only fair I know who I am speaking to first.

Whereas the person I was talking to (We'll call them Other) had a conversation that looked like this:

DeclarativeCoho: Hey.
Other: hi?
DeclarativeCoho: Hello.
Other: To whom am I speaking?
DeclarativeCoho: I think it is only fair I know who I am speaking to first.

No one is really sure what is up with this, other than someone wants the world to make friends.  I think this is super awesome, because who doesn't like friends.  On the other hand, I feel slightly violated.  This is basically like a stranger saying, "Haaaaave you met Dan?"  I believe its foundations are in The Great Gatsby, where a central theme is random meetings of people.  So, it fosters friendship and has literary references, which I can certainly stand behind, but is still pretty unsettling.

It turns out that the person I was talking to is pretty awesome.  She went to MIT and is now at Stanford pursuing a Ph.D in applied physics.  But I don't think we'll be friends, simply because I feel fairly inferior to her.  But it was fun.  And now that I know what is going on, I am actually going to talk to people who randomly message me, explain what is going on, and meet interesting people.  If you like, you can get it to randomly pair you with people.

If you'd like to know more about this wacky thing, wikipedia has an article you can read.

Now I feel kind of bad for being a jerk to the first few people this happened to me with.  Maybe they were Ph.D students as well...

The End of the World

I just thought I'd let everyone know, the world is going to end on December 21, 2012.

It's not going to be nuclear war, or global warming that does it either. No, it will be our nice, friendly Milky Way galaxy that does it.

It all started with the Mayans. They were master mathematicians and astronomers. They could predict solar and lunar eclipses approximately as accurately as we can now. Pretty amazing stuff. Anyways, they had a wonky sort of calendar, which was actually three calendars: a religious calendar, a sun-calendar and a long-count calendar. The religious calendar had 240 days in it, the sun calendar 365 and the long count with 1,872,000 days in it, corresponding to their super keen non-standardized number system, which is almost like base 20, except that they switch it up to other numbers, like 18 or 12 for some digits.

Anyways, clever archaeologists have managed to line up actual dates with the long dates, and have discovered that day 1 of the long date was August 11, 3114 BCE. This places the next day 1 as December 22, 2012. According to Mayan legend, which I am not going to cite, or even give a clue as to how I divined this, the world ends when the current age comes to an end, to be re-born again the following day. This has already happened three or four times, depending on who you ask (the Egyptians thought it was three, the Mayans thought it was four. Both had a long-count-esque sort of calendar).

So, we can definitely see that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. The question is: how? As it turns out, the same people who are experts in Mayan Prophecy are also experts in Astro-physics. These people are so incredible they can predict, down to the second, when the ecliptic plane will intersect the galactic plane. For the un-initiated, the ecliptic plane is the plane that the planets rotate around the sun on, and the galactic plane is the plane that runs through the centre of the galaxy. Astro-physicists have some various guesses as to where this plane is, but it's pretty hard to nail down exactly, due to the galaxy being quite large, and our instruments being somewhat imperfect. But luckily, the Mayan Scholars have come through for us to inform us that the two planes will intersect at 11:59:59 on December 21, 2012.

Now the question becomes: so what? Well, this one physicist, who is totally legit FYI, thinks that when the two planes intersect, it's going to throw off the balance of gravity in the sun and set off a huge solar flare. This coincides with an event that even mainstream scientists agree with, the 11 year periodic reversal of the sun's magnetic poles. Every 11 years, the sun's magnetic poles flip, causing a spike in solar flare activity. So, we have the sun's polarity flipping and the planes lining up, setting us up for some pretty awesome flares.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL.

Usually, the earth's magnetic field protects us from such solar flares (although some hefty ones have caused some circuits to fry in the past), but here we're in for another surprise. You see, like the sun, the earth's magnetic field reverses every so often. Could every so often be every 1,872,000 days? It surely could! So, on December 21, 2012, with the help of the planes intersecting, our planet's magnetic poles will flip. Due to some pretty sophisticated science that you probably won't understand (because it is such good science), this will cause the solar flare to become trapped in the earth's atmosphere, frying everything on the surface (us).

In summary, it seems pretty certain that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. Also, I should add that it is the winter solstice that day, which corresponds to some pagan beliefs about various things which I can't be bothered to explain to someone who isn't one with the earth mother. Also, I'm pretty sure that's the day the LHC is going to perform the experiment to re-create the big bang, so we're pretty much screwed either way. All in all, best to hide in your basement until then.

Note: This post is kind of like a game. A game called "spot the real science." I'll give you a hint: there is very little to find

Never Forget the Dairy

Today I was looking for some way to organize all of the things I have to get done at work. I usually use Google Calendar for organizing my life, but work poses some problems that Google Calendar can't solve. For example, I often have about 90 ongoing projects to work on, none of which have a set due date. Also, some projects are more important than others and gCal has no way of dealing with that. I do not intend to abandon gCal, but I need something to compliment it. I considered downloading some to-do software or potentially using Outlook's built in features. But I have an additional problem. I alternate between three computers at work, sometimes more. So I will only be able to access my list one third of the time. Obviously that won't work.

I did, however find this fantastic web app called Remember The Milk It is a list-making application it it basically does everything I ever wanted in terms of making a list. Here is a screenshot of the list of things I could remember I had to get done in the near future at work:



Basically, you make a list (in my case, the list I am using is "Work"). You add tasks to the list (with the very obvious "add task" button). Then, you can muddle about with the options, setting higher or lower priority, a due date, how long you think it will take, and whatever else you might want. There's an option there for it.

The best part though, is the ability to tag tasks. It should be stated that I love organizing via tags, and so here I am very happy. It works just the way you might expect it to, and is ever so convenient. The only downside I have found is that you can't make "smart lists" that are automatically generated from a given tag.

I intend to use this app, and I would like other people I know to do so as well. This site ALSO has some social networking features (like the ability to share tasks) so it would be great for collaboratively planning something.

Blogging

I've decided to start another blog, in the hopes that I will actually update this one. I've decided to use it as a sort of vomitorium of ideas. (A vomitorium, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like.) If I happen to be thinking about something I find interesting, I'll post it here, and that will hopefully allow me to firm up the ideas floating around. There's also on off chance someone else might find it interesting as well.

So, I've decided it's only appropriate to write my first post here about blogging. This is now my fifth blog, despite the fact that if someone asks me I usually say I don't like the idea of blogging. Each of the four previous blogs have been for a different purpose: my first, five years ago, was to test the waters and see what was up this blogging thing everyone kept talking about; my second was a development blog as my roommate and I worked on a programming project that we ultimately abandoned; my third a collaborative blog about the events of my apartment with my roommates and my fourth a travel blog from when I went to China.

And for some reason, even though I was writing all these blogs, for some reason it took me until fairly recently to realize why saying I was opposed to blogs was incredibly silly. Blogs are used for so many things that it's impossible to disqualify them all.

The sort of blog I'm not a big fan of is a personal blog dealing with emotions and relationships, a sort of online, pubic diary. I am a big fan of talking about those things in real life, and I do it all the time. But the problem I have is the public aspect. Putting your innermost thoughts online for the world to see strikes me as a sort of exhibitionism that I find distasteful. Furthermore, I feel voyeuristic reading them, which sort of heightens my aversion.

There is another, related kind of blog that I am not really opposed to, but I have no interest in reading. That is a sort of journal blog, wherein one talks about what things they did that day. I find those interesting only if I don't have regular contact with the person writing them. Otherwise, it becomes too easy to simply read their blog and feel a part of their life, even though you haven't spoken in months. However, if you haven't spoken in months, then it's perfectly alright.

Taking all that into account, I was warring with myself over the tone I wanted to take with this blog. On the one hand, I could keep it strictly professional, writing like I was writing an article on a particular topic. On the other, I could delve into personal stories to illustrate my point. In the end, I chose a balance between the two. I am sharing my own personal opinions (which are not fact, much as I try and convince people otherwise) which will require occasional forays into my personal life. But not very far, and not very specific. The list of the blogs I've had in the past above is probably about as personal as I'm going to go. I intend to never identify any of my friends, or give any details about their lives. All that will be included is enough to explain why I think a certain way.

So, this blog is the ability for me to explain the way I think, if to no one else, then at least to myself. It would be nice if anyone else were reading, but hardly necessary. I've jumped on the web 2.0 bandwagon, and blogging is a huge part of that. It's possible no one will read after this post, but ah well. I don't intend to watch what I say overly much, so I'm likely to say something to offend people. To that, I say tough luck.