Ticketmaster revealing too much

As much as I like seeing live shows, the extra fees for tickets have seemed to get even more ridiculous than they already were.

Since I've been a fan of Nine Inch Nails since before Jen's students were born, I was happy that they are finally touring the US for the first time in several years. Of course, I had to use Ticketmaster. I poked around, asking for various grades of tickets to see which combination of options gave me something worth buying. They have one of those Captcha / enter-two-words-so-we-know-you-are-human thing, I guess to discourage robot scalpers?

Anyway, this is one that I got this afternoon:

It sure does.

Nine Inch Nails - The Slip

Continuing with the middle finger extended at his (ex) record label, Trent Reznor has released an entire new album today for free download.

http://theslip.nin.com/

This is on top of placing the first single, Discipline, for free download one day after it started playing on radio (at least in L.A.) a few weeks ago.

Owlcam!

Apparently a new family of Great Horned owls has nested in trees at the Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada. They did as any proper group with the right resources and a dedicated connection to the Internets would do: they set up a webcam.

No cute little baby owls yet, but Mom has been fully in view all day so far (at least the times I've checked).

(via the otherwise guilty-pleasure UK pop culture mailing list, Popbitch)

Favorite April Fools prank 2008

I emerge from my grad school cave to attempt to resume blogging. This was my favorite of the stuff that went around yesterday:

Who wants expensive robot pets for Christmas?

Several new robots for pets are on the horizon. Creppy videos below for:

• Yume Neko Smile, a robot kitty designed for small Japanese apartments that don't allow live pets. Already for sale!


• Pleo, a baby dinosaur whose creators claim will develop a unique personality. But does it have a mute button?

I'll stick to my puking, pooping, ornery, live cat for now, thanks.

Nerdy Tribute to Madeleine L'Engle

If you didn't know already, the author of "A Wrinkle In Time" and several other classic young adult books, Madeleine L'Engle, died last week. (the NY Times did a nice article.)

With that one book, she managed to have more of a profound impact on my life than any other author in current memory. Although the science was extremely fuzzy in the interests of fiction, I credit this novel with my first exposure to concepts of genetics and higher dimensional physics. Thus began a long happy time reading science fiction and noodling around in avenues of real science.

As for that esoteric fourth dimension, NPR recently produced a segment that does a good job of explaining the basics. I still wish there were better methods for building tesseract models as 3D projections than I can find online...

Which lolcat are you?

I has test results.
Let me show you them.

Link: The Which Lolcat Are You? Test written by GumOtaku on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Flight Patterns

Wow, PhD productive downtime from blogging, but I missed a chance to discuss some weird and fun stuff as it was happening. Oh well.

Congrats to Jen for getting credentialated!

There is this fun bit from someone at the UCLA Design|Media Arts group:

http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/Documentationl2.html

My new favorite fungus

Hooray for parasites!

Happy New Year

December managed to close out 2006 in style.

• I succeeded in grossing myself out and finishing the Fatburger Triple King Challenge, all 1.5 pounds of beefyness.


• We started hiking around Los Angeles again once a week.


• We stayed in LA of Christmas. That meant visiting family in Riverside county, which was at least a lowkey event.


• Tivo!

Now, three days into 2007, I've been to the gym once and we finally have all three beer taps at home in use.