5K

five thousand hits! NOBODY LOVES ME!

snrrt. - L

on squeamies

squeamie, noun: peep who doesn't want anything to do with implanted technology because of the eeew factor. take the guy who saw me submitting a paper at the CSD offices a couple weeks ago, sorting through the pages with the massive paperclip i was gonna need stuck to the back of my hand on a nodule. gross factor triggered when he realised what the deal was, and eeew guy was out of there, making the squeamie face.

it's not a good thing to be afflicted with, the squeam. i remember my first back-of-the-hand cannula - they leave an impression for about a day after you remove them, and i was fucking horrified. i couldn't look at it, kept the whole thing hidden under a dressing and threw up the first time i touched it. i thought it was a leftover needle that had got stuck in there (i think i mentioned it before here, but i forget...) see, i used to have this problem with subdermal critters - still do - and it fucked me up.

what gets rid of the problem is exposure. after that first cannula, the others didn't seem so bad - that kid i used to be, who screamed bloody murder when there were maggots and blowflies in the yard bin, is now me; i've cut out stitches with a penknife and forced metallic bits of crap inside my own flesh and tolerated all kinds of medical bullshit. you can be an ex-squeamie.

so get out there, ladies. show off your subderms, frighten some normals. you're helping in the long run.

L

Maxwell's equations, or when to shut up

Professor James Clerk Maxwell, 1831-1879: dude united electricity and magnetism in Maxwell's equations, and taught pretty fucking close to where i live, at Marischal College, part of the University of Aberdeen (wasn't at the time, but whatever.) his equations for electromagnetism are based on Gauss, Ampere and Faraday's work; Maxwell synthesised their ideas into a unified theory. smart dude.

so i'm sitting in Physics 2512 a while ago, learnin' about said smart dude and how he's ONE OF US SILVER CITY SCUM and therefore even smarter by comparison, surrounded by physics majors whose intellectual acumen for the subject far exceeds mine (mine's limited to generating overly verbose descriptions of lessons rather than actually absorbing them.) luckily, i've sat next to dumbfuck, who would've made a good gymnast or something but is definitely not a physicist - beautiful, thin and clearly not getting it. even more luckily, i'm none of that there triad.

"I don't get how an electric field and a magnetic field can be the same." dumbfuck shuffles her papers in disgusted bafflement at the very idea.

"It's not," i say (i talk like i type, monotonously and drug-addledly.) "Electric fields generate magnetic fields, vice versa." it's a tutorial class, so to my excitement and everyone else's chagrin, we're allowed to talk, which means i'm allowed to inflict my shit on other people. "If you make a magnetic field change, it makes an electrical field. You make an electric field change, you get a magnetic one." i am of course paraphrasing Wikipedia's Maxwell's equations, but she doesn't know that. she sorta nods. cool, i think, you're teaching, Lepht!

so i carry on. "That's how this RFID chip works," i explain, and i poke the chip under my skin (you can see it move, and it's visible at rest too since the anaemia got bad.) "Reader emits an electrical field, generates a magnetic go-between field, generates another electrical field in the chip. Chip sends an identification value to the reader - no batteries," and i must've sounded pretty proud of that, i guess, even though i didn't have fuck all to do with creating it. "It's passive power. Never runs out."

i coulda stopped there, since dumbfuck was looking pretty freaked out (she turned out to be one of those doesn't-like-subdermal-stuff squeamies), but no, my stupid ass decided to carry on. "That's how all these neodyms work as well," and i continue my in-your-face poking of various non-flesh body parts. "You get near an EM field, it generates a little current in 'em, makes your hands tingle. Like this," and i hit Ctrl-C on my notes, point to the spot under the backtick key where the HDD is, "you can tell if the hard drive is active that way. It's cool, no?"

she did not think it was cool. i gotta learn when to shut the fuck up.

the everyday life - it burns

i keep burning myself on everyday objects because of my crapped-out addict's brain. today i've clocked up shower burn, dishwater burn, steam burn from the fucking kettle and two counts of that-drink-is-too-hot-you-junkie-moron burn.

i really gotta sort this out. i'm hurting myself with coffee.

god damnit

i'm reading Dune again, because i'm meant to be studying for finals, but the fact that Paul is both the name of the main d00d and the never-used real name of a good buddy of mine is messing up my mental images. i keep visualising said /b/tard buddy saying things that would make him do the People's Eyebrow in confusion and making myself laugh.

stupid social circle ruins my nerd fun.

work!

finally, i have some work. work that involves NuGO, the European Nutrigenomics Organisation, a Kerrighed-based Linux Beowulf cluster, and a research institute of bioinformaticists all eminently more qualified than i am (the guy i'll be working directly under has three degrees; i haven't even finished my first.) i'm not all that sure what is and isn't protected data on this, but i'm going to be developing a prototype cluster, one that implements BioLinux and Kerrighed, among other things. that's to stop me b0rking the main Beowulf before the new stuff's properly tested. i'll be writing a report that'll go all the way to NuGO on it.

this is going to be so much fucking fun!

ed. in addition, i got the ego massage of a lifetime when i found out that one of my three rival candidates dropped out of the running because "If Lepht's running for it, it's out of my depth"; the professor i worked for last summer didn't just give a good recommendation but actively told the bioinformaticists that i'd be good for the job and they should interview me; and the interviewers told me they'd already heard of me from the Computing Science department (cause of my grades and my running the CS student society), the helpdesk (cause i volunteer, natch) and through the secular society website (cause i wordpress'd it). i'm famous amongst my vast superiors!

a hint:

when making certain disgusting, acidic homebrew concoctions out of (airquotes) decorative plant matter, for the love of fuck, never add aspartame. jesus fucking christ, and i thought it was bad unsweetened.