I'd have tweeted this, but I don't think the person I know who'd be most interested in it is on Twitter. So here you go:

Basic cellular bio as a Flash game.

Meantime: Alaska was fun. Posted a few silly pics (and one video) to flickr.

Still coughing. This is unprecedented. Doc says it's not a sinus infection and there don't seem to be other symptoms. Allergy meds haven't done anything (and it was the same in Alaska as it was in NJ). I'm just coughing. Not badly, but I need cough drops every hour to hold it at bay. Doc gave me better cough suppressant, but that doesn't seem to be helping. I'm supposed to give it another day or so. Then I'll try a course of antibiotics. If that doesn't help, he also gave me a prescription for an inhaler. And said I should call him if it comes to that. We shall see.

Due to leave for Alaska first thing tomorrow morning. I'll be lucky to get half a night's sleep. If we go at all.

Trip might be good for me. And we'd be the only ones from our side of the family at the wedding.

Alaska's forecast is for rain, pretty much all week. Which, of course, means never-ending humidity.

Tonight I spiked a fever - low grade, but first I've had in five years, if not ten.

My skull is killing me. There are spikes stabbing into my eye sockets. Every time I cough, every pain receptor in my skull lights up. My chest is somewhat congested and definitely not happy. My stomach is queasy. I've got shooting pains in my hips. My knees are no better, and really not sure about supporting my weight. My big toes keep randomly flashing major pain signals, too, for no apparent reason. My shoulder's about to give out. I can hardly see straight.

A friend is in pain and there's nothing I can do to help. Someone else has gone off again advocating discrimination - though not under that name, of course. Hardly anyone will even bother returning my calls or emails.

Oh, and Twitter's API has been acting up all day.

I'm going to try to make it upstairs so I can start packing. Meant to do it earlier, but getting off the couch involved screaming pain in several places - as if there wasn't enough just lying down.

Sometimes, I wish I believed in God... just so I could have someone to yell at.

So much for taking a break from venting, huh?

Anger and pain. That's it. Just anger and pain.

I'm disappointed in myself.

I want to say I'm taking a break until I can find something more positive, but I'm not sure I should. Or can. It's not like I have much else. And I do still need the contact.

I don't know, but this isn't working.

But hey, I did unexpectedly stumble across an hour and a half (which was scheduled to be half an hour) of late-night New York roller derby. Never watched that before. Couldn't keep up with who was who in the pack, even with the announcers, but it's an interesting sport. And everyone in it has a punny stage name, right down to the EMTs, refs, and broadcast A/V guys. Oh, and for some reason, the girl in the logo reminds me of alligee.

This should probably be access-locked or cut or something, but right now I just don't seem to care.

I feel like there's nowhere I belong right now.

Not L&C. Great while it lasted, but I lost interest and the fandom changed. We grew in different directions.

Not fandom at large. I don't have it in me to create anymore, I don't seem to have any interest in fanworks, and I'm not equipped to deal with the unchecked wankery that pervades the open waters (as opposed to the magically sheltered harbor of L&C).

Not Dreamwidth. I tried, but I don't fit. I've made few friends, found little to drive me. My reading page, which used to force me to skip 20 or 40 every time I checked in, just to catch up, now flows at a trickle. I've dropped some subscriptions, some people have stopped posting altogether, and there are probably others who are just locking me out. And, of course, there are my views on activism. I'm too tired to fight that one out, and I don't think many of the people I'd be fighting with are interested in listening.

Which reminds me - I'm looking to step down from ownership of dwrocks. The comm just isn't going anywhere. It needs someone to promote it, to drive it. I'm not up to doing that. Too tired and too conflicted. Besides, I have a feeling it would do better if it weren't associated with me. There's a poll out asking people for reasons why Dreamwidth is awesome. That gets an OMG squee and a full paragraph/subsection of the weekly news post. But an entire comm dedicated to that idea, that's been around since before Open Beta launch, that was actively trying to organize fundraising for the one-year anniversary? The site owners have long since disassociated themselves from it. And I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with my controversial stance that racefail fails. Overzealous, counter-productive, short-sighted, somewhat hypocritical. Its members so used to being attacked and beaten down that their defenses... never mind. But I'd still like the comm to do better than it can under my ownership, so if someone's willing to step up, I'd appreciate it.

Not LJ. It's where many of my closest friends are, but many of them seem to have moved on to other things. My friends page is even slower than my DW reading page. Oh, and LJ management has become evil.

... And just as I was about to type "Not at home" Mom came in to have a discussion on more or less this very topic. I'm lucky to have such supportive (if not always understanding) parents. Wouldn't have gotten anywhere near this far without them. But it's not enough anymore. I'm going stir crazy around here. When I have the energy to go stir crazy, anyway. Mom's trying to encourage me to find something - which obviously I need - but I don't know where to look and I'm tired and burnt out and each new dead end just smacks me in the face again. She's got ideas, and she believes in them, but from where I stand, every time I've tried one of her ideas, it's done more harm than good.

Not in the outside world. Like I said, I'm burnt out and out of ideas. I just don't see where I can go or what I can do. And I find that I have a lot of trouble dealing with realtime social interaction. Too slow, too awkward, too out of practice, too hurt and bitter, too short on patience, too irritable, too short on anything of interest to talk about.

The last decade has eroded me, bit by bit. I'm a hollowed-out husk of my former self. And my life is just as empty. Any moderate effort - mental or physical - wears me out so quickly that I just can't see how I can be of any use (especially given my constantly-changing sleep/wake schedule - and the total unpredictability of quality of sleep or day-to-day capabilities). How I can accomplish anything of substance. And it's getting worse.

And it doesn't help that I feel lost and hopeless and that I've hurt so much for so long that it's just become a constant ache in my soul.

I don't know what to do. I don't know where to turn. I need to try something, but I don't know what. I've been told to take small steps, which seems eminently reasonable. And yet even attempts at that have failed. And every new failure just makes it all hurt more, makes it all seem more hopeless, more futile.

And so I while away the time. Playing pointless games, watching TV, reading comics. Distracting myself from a life that's become too empty and painful and pointless to contemplate.

Where do I belong? Where do I fit in? What purpose is left for me? Where can I find friends? Interests? Something to do that has some meaning to it? Anything that's more than what I have but does not require of me more than I'm capable of giving?

This is amazing.

The oil spill has been going on for over two months. It'll be at least another month before they can stop it. It's an unthinkably huge environmental disaster. In part, that's because BP ordered shortcuts to be taken (less safety in exchange for faster and cheaper readiness). In part (the bit that everyone seems to have forgotten), it's that TransOcean and Haliburton accepted those orders. In part, it's a complete failure of the government to do its job in maintaining regulations and providing oversight. In part, it's just that no one knows how to handle a situation like this - oil gushing at this depth. Safety technologies have proven ineffective even when properly used. Cleanup and response technologies haven't developed in my lifetime, while drilling has become ever more ambitious.

In response to all this, the Obama administration ordered a six month moratorium on offshore drilling. The oil companies decided to fight that in court. Yesterday, a Louisiana judge handed down his ruling. It's available here in PDF format.

In it, he notes that according to the law, deep water drilling permits are to be given only subject to environmental safeguards, that the Secretary of the Interior has the power to temporarily suspend operations if there's a threat to life (including fish), property, mineral deposits, or the environment, and that such an order may only be overturned if the court determines that the order was given arbitrarily and capriciously. The administration pointed out, among other things, that we can't handle the disaster we've got now - there's no way we'd be able to cope if another well was to blow. The last section of the ruling (beginning halfway down page 21) is entitled "irreparable harm."

It all seems pretty clear, doesn't it?

The ruling?

The moratorium is arbitrary and capricious. And would cause irreparable harm... to the oil companies.

Some are pointing out that the judge in question owns stock in at least five of the companies involved. I'm personally not as concerned about that. That's five companies out of well over a hundred that he invests in, and he lists the minimum range for four of the five.

In any case, the Obama administration is appealing it. And hopefully reissuing the moratorium, this time with better documentation.

nicki wrote a post yesterday entitled On problematic writing. It's a good post and makes some important points. I recommend reading it. However, as I've said before and will no doubt say again, I believe it's important to consider all sides of an issue. Nicki's post presents one side - it's an address the author receiving criticism on matters of racial sensitivity. I'd like to present the other side - to those making the criticism.

( Here we go... )

The cover article in this week's NY Times magazine is about something that more or less comes down to an updated version of the Turing Test. It seems IBM is developing a computer that can play Jeopardy. (And it will, too, in an upcoming special episode with a couple of past champions.) They're hoping it will develop into a whole new line of revolutionary systems that can sort through huge amounts of data to answer complex questions in real time. If you have any interest in AI, go check it out.

BTW, in case anyone cares, it turns out I was wrong. Gillette's actual new razor introduced 6/6... still has 5 blades. They're just thinner now. And there have been some other design tweaks. Nothing that strikes me (not having tried the old or new ones) as earth-shaking. In fact, they say the differences may not be visible to the naked eye. But they assure us that the differences are there and important. I'm surprised, especially given all the ad dollars they put in to announcing the launch more than a month in advance.

But... Whatever.

(Cross-posted to scans_daily.)

Back in my early days online, I went by the name MadHatter. Then, one day, to help deal with chat room lulls, I came up with a superhero alter ego - HatMan. He'd drive in with his Sombreromobile, have a crazy adventure, get people laughing and talking, and then drive off, job well done. (Eventually, he picked up a sidekick, HairPin, who drove a CapCar, but that's another matter.) I was never clear on what HatMan looked like, really, except that he had a colorful costume and a signature beanie copter. Eventually, when I decided to use my poor graphical skills to make an icon to represent him, I wound up using an image of Robin as a base and drawing the beanie copter on over his head. (I didn't know many people who were into comics at the time, it was clear there was a connection to Batman, but I wanted someone cheerful-looking.)

Today, I finally got around to reading Batman issue #700. (I get my comics mail-order, so there's a delay, and this was at the bottom of the latest stack.) It's a landmark issue. It's also the first issue of Batman I've read in over a year. This is what I saw:



The Mad Hatter putting a beanie copter on Robin.

And, a few pages and a decade or so later in the story:



A guy (who looks eerily similar to this issue's version of the Mad Hatter) in a sombrero whose name is Hatman.

Coincidence?

Almost certainly. But still... how awesome is that?

ETA: Apparently, there was another version of Mad Hatter in the comics - a revamped version who was retconned into an impostor of the original (which makes more sense because he looked and acted differently). He hadn't appeared since 1987, but it looks like the current writer is bringing him back... now going by Hatman. The sombrero is probably a coincidence - he has an obsession with hats, and is wearing a different hat in every panel of this comic. It's not clear whether he'll appear again any time soon, but I'm guessing he wouldn't have been brought back, shown to be alive in the present, and given a new name just for this one story.

I'm... not entirely sure how I feel about that.

Two updates which have nothing to do with each other.

( Waffles! )

( The US Presidential Election of 1876 )

In some ways, it sounds so familiar. But it does make the 2000 election look rather tame by comparison, doesn't it?