I've recently scanned a bunch of my old drawings and put some of them up on my web site.
( samples below )

There were some ape-men. One of them got eaten by a leopard. Then a big black rectangle shows up. Then there about 10 minutes are waltzing spacecraft. Some guy goes to the moon and sees a big black rectangle. Then they go to Jupiter and en route the computer goes bat-shit crazy. At Jupiter there is a big black rectangle. Then we have about 20 minutes of Kubric dropping acid, and it all ends with a giant space fetus.

The movie actually makes even less sense than my synopsis.

What is the point, exactly?

Here's a neat idea an engineer came up with to extract energy from very slow moving currents
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6842

comments - this would allow us to extract energy from rivers without the many environmental issues that plague current hydroelectric projects: blocking salmon runs, flooding land, and huge reservoirs that produce large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide from rotting plant remains. Dams will still be necessary for flood control, agricultural irrigation, and drinking water reservoirs. In addition, this design could tap into energy from rivers that would be impractical for traditional turbine hydropower. It also has potential for tapping tidal and wave power, and offshore currents. The low environmental impact of these "rollers" seems particularly attractive. I just hope it can pan out in an economical way - I've seen far too many innovative ideas that never really get anywhere and eventually are forgotten.

On another subject, ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) looks like it might get a renaissance. Several large OTEC plants are in the works in tropical offshore areas and islands. For those not familar with the idea, OTEC uses the temperature difference of surface waters and the ocean depths to drive turbines and extract electrical power. The idea has been around since at least the 1970's, but beyond a small pilot plant in Hawaii was mostly abandoned.

Wow.

I just have to say that the play "Children of Eden" totally rocks. It knocked my socks off.

I finally finished the pic of the dragon and the unicorn. This time I remembered to reduce the size to something more easily visible on a web browser.
( click for pic )

I'm putting up a work in progress of a picture of a dragon and unicorn. It is large (I didn't realize GIMP was showing a reduced size when I scanned it), so beware.
( Dragon vs. Unicorn )

Reciprocity from mimid316
(Yes, that's right. You'll need to go to her journal to read my answers...)

Tell me 36 things about you ...
( questions, questions )

Critters seen when floating down the river: a flash of mink, a bald eagle.
Critters seen on the porch in the evening: lots of deer.
Critters seen while perforating an archery target: an accipiter hawk floating past, before sinking into the ravine.
Critters seen while checking highway for roadkill: two racer snakes (caught both of 'em), probably preparing to enter their hibernation den.

LiveJournal - an external drive for human memory.

* What happens if the LHC acts as a giant lens, focusing some strange energy on the antipodal site on the earth?

* Suppose you have two crystal spheres, each about the size of a plum. When people gather around each sphere, you can see and hear what is happening around the other sphere allowing instant (faster than light) communication. The first time the spheres are used like this, it also transports people from one sphere to another, instantly.
- but what is really happening has a darker side. One of the spheres is actually sucking all the good ideas and creativity from everyone around it and sending them to people around the other sphere. One city becomes constantly befuddled and confused, while at the other the arts and sciences flourish. The physical transport doesn't occur just because it is the first time the spheres are used - it occurs whenever enough wonder and intellectual excitement is generated.

(In the dream things started getting really bizarre when this was realized, with the female physicists having to do pole dances for the wonder-fest - they were understandably a bit upset. Then Neils Bohr got in a philosophical discussion with Yoda, and Yoda ended up telling a parable about fish that got everyone's wonder levels high enough that the group of physicists could transport a couple of liters of thermite to the other crystal to ignite the rogue mathematician that had stolen it.

Afterward, the dream got oddly recursive, with me telling the story of what happened to other folks riding the bus.)

( click for some bang! bang! )

Cloth armor, while offering pretty good protection against muscle powered weapons of all sorts, is the sucketh against firearms. It stopped most but not all pellets of 11 birdshot from ~20 and ~8 meters, although at ~2 meters the spread was so slight that the combined mass acted much like a solid slug to blast through. .22 LR from a Ruger 10/22 was hardly affected, one bullet keyholed partway through and exited sideways, the others just punched straight through. 9 mm bullets from a friend's pistol chambered for 9 mm Parabellum went right through. Perhaps I don't even need to add that the .30 caliber bullets from my deer rifle chambered in .30-06 didn't even seem to notice the fabric as they blew through. This armor is already around 3 cm thick and around 10 kg/m^2, enough to save you from bullets would be both cumbersome and so thick as to impede normal movement (plus, you'd look like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man).

( Click for smashing stuff )

This is surreal. My bull snakes are racist. They will only eat white rats. The male seems to be more broad minded, as he eventually, with significant trepidation, decided to sample a black rat. The female would not even consider such a thing, although I eventually convinced her to eat a mulato (well, it had a black head and white body, I guess she thought that was good enough).

Maybe next time, I use peroxide.

Oooh, lost adventurers have to fight off a dragon
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/07/missing.divers/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
and it's real life, not D&D!

I've been thinking recently about brains, and the nature of perception, reaction, and awareness. We can often react to stimuli without being consciously aware of the stimulus. For example, we do not perceive our pupils dilating in response to low light conditions, and we can react to contact with intense heat before we are aware of the burning sensation because our limb is jerked away by spinal cord reflexes before the nerve signals reach our brain. On the other hand, we seem to be neurologically programmed to attribute perception and awareness to anything which responds similarly to how we would. For example, many simple worms lack a brain - having at most a concentration of nerves in a ganglia. Without a brain, they are unable to feel anything, let alone think. However, they can react - they move toward food, and draw back from injury. If a damaging stimulus is continually applied, the worm writhes as if in pain. We intuitively think that it is in pain and experience an emotional reaction of sympathy, even though the worm is not suffering.

Now, there are many critters on this fine earth that have brains. Of that great bough of the tree of life that includes the animals, one of the main branches is a group of animals called the deuterostomes. This group contains the echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars), hemichordates (acorn worms dwelling in marine sediments; filter feeding, tube dwelling marine pterobranch worms), tunicates (sessile pulsating filter feeding marine blobs), and craniates (hagfish, lampreys, and all vertebrates, including us). In this group, only the craniates have brains. During evolution, the ability to actually perceive one's surroundings rather than to simply react on reflex arose somewhere among the craniates. None of the others can actually feel anything.

However, there are other groups of animals that are more distant on the tree of life that do have brains - arthropods (insects, spiders, crabs, centipedes) and mollusks (snails, squid) among them. However, these brains are a separate evolutionary development - if the more primitive deuterosomes do not have brains, the common ancestor of craniates, arthropods, and mollusks cannot have had a brain and thus brains must have evolved independently at least twice. The convergence of behavior between advanced craniates and the cephalopod molluscks is remarkable - even brainless organisms can learn to some extent, but cephalopods can learn rapidly, exhibit behaviors that seems like reasoning, engage in play, and actively explore their environment in a systematic way. It is tempting to attribute human feelings to them - curiosity, fear, anger, even affection. However, the neural base of their behaviors is built on a very different substrate from that of humans. With no common origin, the feelings and perceptions of a cephalopod must be completely alien to our own, but honed by evolution so the observable consequences of those feelings and perceptions - behavior - is similar in both cases, because the consequences of those sets of behaviors are beneficial for passing on one's genes. A squid cannot feel pain as we know it, cannot be interested or terrified, even though it can act like a human experiencing pain or terror or interest. The same argument holds for crabs and bugs and spiders. They live in a mental world completely alien to our own.

At what point can we reasonably suspect that our feelings are similar to those of an animal? My guess is when the part of the brain responsible for processing those feelings shares a common evolutionary origin between ourselves and the animal. The parts of the brain that process smell and tactile sensations and vision are ancient, so it may be that hagfish experience a sensation somewhat akin to our seeing a glow of light when their primitive (but non-image forming) eyes are exposed to illumination, and what a lamprey experiences as smell we would also identify as an odor (although probably an unfamillar one) if we could experience the same sensation. A touch to a ray-finned fish probably has some similarity to a touch on our bare skin, and the feeling of a fish when its lip is pierced by a barbed steel hook likely has similarities to what we would call agony. Is a fish's agony, in it's mental world, as different from our agony as a fish's rayed fins are to our arms and legs? Both are homologues, developed from a common source, but the latter example shows how different they can end up being. Closer to our twig of the tree of life, the brain developed to experience simple emotions - fear, rage, lust. The basics of these sensations would be shared between us and reptiles and birds. Reptiles and birds, however, would not share our "higher" emotions. Many birds display strong pair bonding behavior, but they cannot be in love the same way we can be in love. It is only other mammals that would share a common basis for all of our feelings save for those associated with sympathy and ethics - and even primitive and distorted versions of those latter emotions may be found among the great apes.

The full issue of human awareness of the self, of a past with a life story and future with associated hopes and dreams, is far too complex for me to address in this post.

I just ran across a description of a bizarre parasite. The tongue eating louse is a kind of isopod crustacean which parasitizes fish. It gets into the fish's mouth, and eats away its tongue. bad enough, but it then attaches to the tongue base, drinking from the artery that supplies blood to the tongue, and acts like a prosthetic tongue for the fish! The fish can apparently use it to manipulate food like a normal tongue. More details:
http://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/pfk/pages/item.php?news=719
and a photo here
http://tolweb.org/Isopoda/6320

I've been on a cephalopod kick recently. They are just so delightfully weird. Just to share, here are some film clips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ZQH2Uzpew&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-azBDt0kik&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8cf7tPoN5o&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9A-oxUMAy8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQWxIrSRDQQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsx6lZG1Jo4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBg0k9GbHiw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo53ErZgkRw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjycOCyUZ1c&feature=related

Here's an exciting development - in a decade, we may all be using biofuels in our current cars without ever realizing it.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111392&org=NSF&from=news
Researchers have developed a way to turn plant cellulose into gasoline in a much more environmentally friendly way that current ethanol biofuels.

So, I live in the Tri-Cities. Not exactly a bastion of culture and refinement. Maybe Richland has some pretensions to something like snobbery, but Pasco is as hick as they come. So it was high time I embraced the lifestyle of my home territory.

A friend invited me out. To a MONSTER TRUCK RALLY! The people attending were farmers and ranchers and folks who wore cowboy hats and drove trucks. They had massive machines racing over dirt tracks, dirt bike and quad-racer exhibitions, plus a tough truck contest where ordinary folks brought out old junkers to race around the track - most of which ended up with broken axles or smashed up front ends or just flipped over (only a few were later able to drive out under their own power). There were mounds of carefully placed dirt so the contestants could jump over them at high speed. Monster trucks roaring up over the jumps, flying high into the air, and bouncing down from on high were quite an impressive sight. Flying bits of broken machinery was a common theme throughout the night. Earplugs were $3.00, and worth every penny.

Next up on the agenda - rodeos, hockey games, and demolition derbys.

A friend of mine had mentioned she liked squid and octopus. So while I was at the fish counter at the local supermarket and saw they had octopus, I bought one. It came frozen in a hockey-puck shaped disk, although a fair bit larger than your typical sports implement. At the time I had no idea how to cook octopus, but after a bit of research I discovered it was not a "quick prepare" meal. So much for making it for Friday's movie night. This would be a weekend project.

I set the puck in the refrigerator to defrost on Friday evening. On Saturday it was still frozen through. Sunday morning, however, had thawed it into a flaccid mass of purplish meat, lifting it up allowed the drooping tentacles to hang down to my knees. The first step is to tenderize the thing. Octopus is very tough and rubbery. I had bought a meat tenderizer, a kitchen hammer with one head flat and the other bumped like some medieval mace. Placing a phone book under the plastic cutting board to protect the counter, I proceeded to thrash the octopus into what should have been jelly. Octopus is very resilient, however, and the rubbery meat seemed to show no particular response to being repeatedly smashed (other than jiggling and bouncing a bit after the blows).

The next step - it was suggested that the critter be par-blanched in order to remove the skin. So I fill up a pot of cold water, droop the cephalopod into it, and set the burner on high. The idea was to boil it for two minutes, then quench it in cold water. Well, boiling it turned the water into a pink froth that foamed up out of the pot, accompanied by a smell that wasn't exactly unpleasant, and in fact was not very strong, but was distinctive. Then I decant the critter into a strainer to rinse it in cold water. The boiling had shrunk all the tentacles so they were curled up in little spirals, and had turned the body-sack inside out. Congealing foam had stained the pot and stove with a rime of white crud.

Then it was time to bring out the knives, to dice and skin the beastie. Well, cutting it into bite-sized pieces is no problem, but how do I skin it? There really seemed to be no skin, the purple covering was firmly attached to the tentacles. It was only when getting to the area around the eyes and "neck" that I was able to separate a bumpy, leathery integument from the underlying meat.

I mentioned octopus is tough, right? Well, the recommended way of dealing with this, in addition to pounding it into pulp, is to cook it for a long time. Hours. Just let it simmer for much of the day. So that's what I did. I filled up a big stew-pot with water, dropped the octopus bits in, and set it to boil. Soon enough, the pot was sputtering and clanking as hot octopus water splashed out over the stove. I turned down the heat to simmer, and the water settled down to turning over in a slow boil while the splattering and clattering subsided to a more sedate pace. I did some exercises. Ran up the mountain. Read a book. Did some work. After five hours, octopus water had soaked the stove and floor and perfumed the house with its unique fragrance. My friend and I decided to see what we could do with the boiled bits. I poured the purplish water and octopus pieces into a strainer, then sampled one. It was flavorless. All the taste had been boiled out. It had the texture of stringy chicken breast meat, but you couldn't even say it tasted like chicken, because it tasted like nothing.

So I chopped up some tomatoes, smashed two cloves of garlic with the meat tenderizer (so much easier to clean than a garlic press), and dumped these veggies along with the meat in a skillet with a good dose of olive oil, parsley, and salt, and then some more salt because the meat really was so flavorless. Sautee the stuff for twenty minutes then serve over linguine.

It was delicious. Actually, the sauce could have been made with any meat and it would have tasted the same, but still, it turned out quite well. A good end to an adventure in cooking. I may never prepare octopus again, but it was quite an experience and I'm glad I did it once.