HP1 and Rain

First - There is a thunderstorm in Southern California in August! WTF Mate! Glad I got to the beach yesterday.

I read HP1, in my opinion not as good as 6, but at least we didn't have to follow Moses through the desert for 40 years (or more likely Jesus in his 40 days of wandering - although it felt more like 40 years than 40 days) like in 7. It was interesting to see how many items she setup for later books. I wonder if she really had it planned that well or if when she wrote later books she just made sure to reference specific items in earlier books. I'm sure I'm far from the first person to ask this, but now it's my turn.

Freed from society

It must, in some ways, be nice to have so few morals and care so little about what others think about you that you can actually work to take away money for poor, sick children.

RAW

I worked on this when it was the RAW project! Sure, I only wrote the beginnings of a shared memory network that probably never went anywhere, but still I wonder if Anat would toss me some stock... Of course that was back before I realized how much cooler analog engineers are than digital weenies who think writing some verilog code is circuit design.

Exercise Wikipedia Hiro

I was reading a set of articles about exercise while waiting for a haircut. The first was claiming that aerobic exercise causes some chemical to be released into the blood stream which causes increased neuron growth. I'm a bit skeptical on that one (although maybe someone reading this knows more about it). The next was talking about the general benefits. But what caught my eye is someone was proposing rather than coming up with drugs to mimic the effects of exercise to instead come up with drugs or some other medical method to make people more prone to exercise.

The NYT has an article about a website that helps track when companies and other organizations change wikipedia articles. According to the article, wikipedia is actually ok with companies correcting factual information, but think it should be limited to that due to the conflict of interest. Wikiscanner lets you look up a company and see which wikipedia articles they have edited (it works based on the ip address - so if the company is even a little clever they can get around it). The NYT article has a nice list of some of the companies that have been caught.

This week I started watching Heroes. I also had a crazy week at work. Friday I came home expecting to crash, but ended up watching the last 12 episodes (finally got to bed at 6 am). Which is really strange since lately I struggle to stay up past midnight. I really liked the show. Well, for the first several episodes I was skeptical that it was going to turn out to be lame, but by time they saved the cheerleader I was into it. Something about Mohinder grates on my nerves, not even counting his many wrong science facts. Hiro is of course awesome! I wonder at what point in making the show they knew Sulu would be part of the cast. I think it would be great to get together a group of comic book and sci fi fans and try to spot all the references.

What I learned this weekend

Raw crab covered in garlic sauce tastes a lot like garlic.

At Korean bbq if 2 out of 3 people are asian they leave cooking the meat to you, but if it is 2 out of 4 then they get a lot more involved.

Jason Bourne is Wolverine.

If you leave a pen in a pocket and then do some laundry it will leave black stains on your clothes and drier that even bleach cannot remove. And then your hands will continue to spell like bleach no matter how many times you wash them.

HP6 and 7

This week I read HP6 and 7. I won't say much about them since practically everyone else has already read them. But to those who encouraged me to read them (which, again is practically everyone) - fine, you were right. I finished 6 at about 8 pm on Sunday and by 10 pm I had purchased and started reading 7.

Over the weekend I also headed to The Improv with Evan, ironically The Improv is a standup comedy place with no improv... The comics were great and the main comic was Mike Birbiglia who was funniest when interacting with one of the crazy audience members.