I just got back from seeing "A Scanner, Darkly" with my friend Chris. I'd really suggest people see this movie -- it's really pretty thought-provoking. It's all about drugs and drug abuse, with a bit of conspiracy twisted in. It's set in the US a few years from now and (strangely enough) is done as an animated feature. It's got some definite ( Read more... )

So today my friend Hiroshi (from Japan) and I were IMing and were talking about AGU, which is this big technical conference in December that's held in San Francisco. Hiroshi, upon hearing that I'd (hopefully) be going this year says, "We need to visit the holy place for you!" My reply: "Hehe -- do you mean the CHOCOLATE holy place?" His ( Read more... )

Anyone here watch Stargate? (AKA: Tim did you finish off those CDs I handed you, yet? If not, stop reading if you don't want SPOILERS ( Read more... )

Today's biweekly seminar at CSR was especially interesting to me. It was based, not on some esoteric scientific finding, but on the history of NASA's Mars-going manned space program, something near and dear to my own heart. Hum Mandell gave the talk, an engineer who worked for NASA in the 60s-90s and generally just knows a lot of stuff. (At ( Read more... )

Robert's already read this, but it was so funny that I'm going to post it here. This is John Greer's "poem" about being a grad student. Enjoy ( Read more... )

I went to see the new Superman movie two days ago. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, either. The acting and characterization parts were good, but, well, there was just a lot of completely overdone and unnecessary, special-effect, "Superman-saves-the-day" sort of stuff towards the end. I won't go into details, because I don't want to spoil a ( Read more... )

Eureka ( Read more... )

Just finished reading "The Dragons of Eden" by Carl Sagan. WOW. This is the third or fourth book of his that I've read, and I'm still constantly amazed by the quality of thought that he portrays. "The Dragons of Eden" is non-fiction (unlike his better-known "Contact"), and deals with (as the subtitle states) "Speculations on the Evolution of ( Read more... )

Today (just an hour ago or so) I went to the new outdoor pool on campus. WOW! I had expected a neat and clean, boring lap-swimming pool. No! Well, okay, there's one of those, and it looks pretty much like what you'd expect. But there are also two other pools for "playing" in (as opposed to working out). One is sort of kidney-shaped and has ( Read more... )

Question: How the HECK do I convince this stupid live journal to let me use italics? I tried the html tags [i] (etc) but those don't seem to work. GRR!!!!!!!

Help please?