Im trying to come up with a new focus for this…… im not sure if i have the time to keep it up. we shall see i suppose
it is nice having that extra webspace
ha

I seem to have been found by the comment spammers, egad thats no fun. In other news im taking on the worlds of busines.. should be a fun ride, the key is to buy low and sell high, call me a value investor if you must, I call it…. smart.

You can pry this judgeship from my cold dead hands

I am anticipating Sin City more than perhaps any other film in recent memory. The star studded cast, Frank Miller directing - using in fact his own art for storyboarding purposes. It is everything a hollywood film should be. I am prepared to be blown away by incredible comic book visuals, the use of color to accentuate a point, dripping from the screen. EGAD LET IT BE AMAZING.

Though fortunately all signs are pointing to yes.

The Sin City comicbook is one that I had not read before the movie was in development. After reading I also attained that love that others were feeling.
Austin is quite the happening place when it comes to film these days
what with sin city blowing up your conceptions of cinema and a scanner darkly sweeping up that which was left behind
true

Bet you thought that this was going to be a steriods entry, well it is indirectly. To me the non-self incriminating of Mark McGwire exposed another seedy level. This would be grammar. Come on “Steroids is bad” what is that? If George Bush said steriods is bad we would be laughing our collectives off. This was not an isolated incident, he made several similar mistakes in short succession. I am up in arms!

I guess we all just misunderestimated Mark McGwire.

I was reminded today about this game. Owen McNally, fellow grad student, gave me a book about Artificial life that mentioned the game cellular automata as developed by John Conway. I first stumbled across this game at the age of 15 or so as a windows 3.11 (or maybe 95) user. At that point calling it a game was a misnomer. After having been exposed to various popularizations of chaos theory and biology systems (IE Richard Dawkins books) it became more of a way to view the world through a guified math. That is what I find incredibly interesting, the ability for images to elucidate math to elucidate life.

Conway’s game of life is a perfect example. When I was fifteen I thought that it was stupid because I missed out on the representational aspects of it. Playing it again with concepts of bacterial fission and growth in mind the squares and colors take on new meetings, you can see how colonization can occur, and even persist given proper conditions. I like to think about it as if you could do an interval on the squares, create squares with width and length of zero, an infinite number, input the proper parameters and will I believe get a perfect model of how bacteria grow. Chaos attractors have been able to approximate leaf shapes, I’m sure someone with a greater background in math can give better more representative examples but these are some that I am thinking of off the top of my head. End result a simple game can explain these concepts better than a thousand-word essay. All you need is a short sentence and the game itself, “This is life, platonic ideal” but you know, a better word than platonic ideal.

Former World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov is retiring from active chess play to pursue political ambition. Frankly the thought of Kasparov as a politician is rather frightening as he is a fiery genius, not well known for smoothing over problems. Despite this, I think that it may be good for someone like Kasparov to enter into Russian Politics. Being a relative outsider, and a well known and admired outsider might help him to clean up Russian corruption. Which as we all know cannot hurt.

I was in Europe in the Summer of 2000. The Nazi Gold scandal had just been a huge part of the media while I was Switzeralnd. To mention it would have caused such great discomfort to our Swiss hosts so of course we did not. Today there is some mention that The United States of America Army seems to have gotten their hands a little dirty with some stolen Nazi gold, it will be interesting to see if this is an ongoing story in the states, seeing as the settlement just happened and I had heard no rumours leading up to it, I doubt it.

There is nothing like the theft of personal belongings to really sully the reputation of our troops.

I am trying to figure out how to spend some of my spring break time, I was considering buying a SXSW film pass, but I am not sure if I want to spend precious Austin spring daylight in a dark movie theater, alas since there are so many films that look really really good I may be doing just that. More to the point, is worrying about spring break sophomoric?

Wonderful news was just sent to me by someone involved in the Taco Bell Boycott. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers CIW has been organizing a boycott against Taco Bell, basically Taco Bell controls the market for Floridian tomatoes and has a great deal of leverage when negotiating with the Tomato Companies. Read about the boycott and the grievances in the embedded link. The gist of the victory is that every demand by the workers was met and the boycott is now over. To quote the friend of mine that sent this to me

“we won! the boycott is over!!! taco bell is going to pay one more
penny per pound for its tomatoes, will sign a code of conduct and
enforce that code with growers with which they contract, and promise
to open their books to the CIW to ensure that the money is going to
the workers, and convene a dialogue between the coalition, growers and
taco bell/yum brands, and if they dont do this, the CIW will take them
to court in the state of new york!! this is amazing. this is the
first time social change has been effected in the fast food industry
through a grassroots movement and the first time social change has
been effected outside the law–that is simply by private negotiations
between workers and market forces. it is truly a first for the
world!!”

Congratulations to the workers, this is an amazing day!