When I was coming home from work this morning, and the podcasts had finished so everything was quiet, I was thinking of how nice and comforting it is to see Orion in the sky. It's like he's a person you know or something. And then I was thinking how I associate Orion with the cold weather, and started to think if there's some weird rotation that goes on where he goes away for the summer -- until I realised that the reason I don't see Orion during the summer is actually because I see no stars at all during the summer, the sky doesn't get dark enough. And I had a little "oh. Right >_>" moment there.

Anyhoo, last night's podcast test drive was the Sinica podcast. And I kind of have to flaunt this a little, I feel really really cool listening to that podcast, because it's all about contemporary China, and this makes me feel like I have broadened my horizons and am all cool and stuff :3 The hosts Kaiser Kuo (half American half Chinese rock star) and Jeremy Goldkorn (South African business man), both of whom have lived in China a really long time, have guests and usually talk about a specific topic. So for example, at work I listened to episodes about sex in China (the guests were the author and the publisher of a recent book about sex in China), humour in China (guests were two expat comedians who were studying the Chinese cross talk comedy thing), healthcare in China (healthcare specialists as guests) and the Chinese internet (much more than just the Great Firewall, the guest was the Economist reporter who had recently done the special report on the Chinese internet). It's really cool. They talk about China as their everyday thing, but they also do pause at times and say "let's explain in case someone listening hasn't heard of this" when events or terms come up. So it's a little like listening in to a conversation of people who are smarter/cooler than you are, but with the added bonus of sometimes they acknowledge that you are listening and they help understand. I think it's much more effective way of crossing that gap of cultural understanding than it would be if someone just explained all the bits that make China so different in some kind of "China for beginners" kind of way. The Sinica way is slower perhaps, but more effective, I think.

The kind of weird thing about Sinica is that in iTunes the episodes are sort of mushed in with the Popup Chinese podcast episodes (Sinica uses Popup's studios). But you can figure them out quite easily, Sinica episodes are 40 minutes to an hour long, while the Popup ones are shorter, and the Sinica podcasts begin with the guitar theme music and Kaiser saying "Welcome to the Sinica podcast..." But it did take me a bit to figure that out :P

New Wes Anderson short film: "Castello Cavalcanti" <3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWnKRJ4c8xY

I just have to say that the simple fact that Wes Anderson makes short films (and sometimes has a short before the main feature film) makes him immediately better than any film maker who doesn't do that C:
And the colours! <3 There needs to be a shade of yellow named Wes Anderson Yellow.

"But let us not confuse what will surely be financial success with brilliant business acumen on the part of the Braves. At least not the sort of acumen which usually gets lauded as the genius of capitalism or whatever. MLB owners live in a world with basically zero risk in order to get their billions. As stadium financing shows, baseball owners live off of other people’s money. Usually public money. And no one ever seems to call these already rich men and corporations out on accepting millions from the government the way poor people are called out on accepting a few hundred or a couple of thousand because they can’t feed their families or get basic medical care."

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/11/11/the-braves-moving-to-a-new-park-is-understandable-but-perverse/

Don't misunderstand here: I don't care about sports. Just wanted to make that clear.
:P

Drawing a thing that turns out really cool is such a hit of happy it should be classified as an illegal drug :3
Photo will happen later, I don't want to ruin my happy feeling by taking a picture of it that just doesn't capture it right.
But suffice to say that I have just inserted five different pokemon into a Goya etching like a boss :D <cue success kid meme>

[Teufelsweib] and I were talking about science stuff (like publishing and repeating experiments and such) in the Junk forum the other say, and then I found this today :)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/11/science-and-its-skeptics.html

http://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/
Haven't read that yet but it looks awesome and also Prufrock.

So I work for the mail service, and in Finland the postal service used to be owned by the nation, then it was turned into aprivatised company where the government/nation owns a majority of the shares. So kind of a half public/half private thing going on here. And ever so often there are negotiations between the unions and the bosses, and this is currently going on. And there's a lot of complicated things of course, but for the area of work that I do - early morning delivery - the biggest beef we have is the way our wages are tied to the amounts of newspaper the employee has on his/her route. Which is of course dependent on the people who subscribe to newspapers, and therefore it's out of the employees control. So the union wants to change that to an hourly wage, so that the employees wouldn't have to worry about their wage fluctuating so much.

Anyhoo, at the moment the union is telling us all that we are doing some mild industrial action to exert pressure during the negotiations: no overtime, no extra work of any kind. Also no surprise time off/holiday requests, that would be unfair too. We have a promise to the customers that we will deliver newspapers by 6am. If for some reason I am not finished by that time, the industrial action dictates that I need to stop and not finish my route. And the papers were late today, and I was thinking "what if it comes down to that today, the clock strikes 6 and I'm not finished? I'd feel pretty bad leaving people out and paperless, after all it's not their fault, but it's also really bad to be a rikkuri (strikebreaker), and the whole point of industrial action is that you demonstrate that the work we do is important and influences everybody..." 

My dilemma was solved in two parts. First, I saw the office guy (every night there is one guy - not exactly a boss, but sort of? - in the office who you call if something happens during the route, like bike breaks down or you drive into a ditch etc... and s/he'll come help) and asked him about it, and he explained that since his official time ends at 7am, he would have to finish my route if I don't. And I was like "man that would suck, I do not want to do that to you. I thought the point was that the customers will complain to the newspaper company and they will complain to the mail company and the mail company will feel the pressure to listen to the union." So I reckoned it's a little pointless to do industrial action that only hurts the other workers. And the second way my dilemma was solved was that I was finished by quarter to six :P

The Google-Doodle today shows different Rorschach tests every time I open a new tab. And to me, they all look like various spaceships from Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc... >_> Analyse that.

So apparently I have a bit of a pet peeve with media talking about science and making statements about research that upon closer inspection are dumbness and not actually getting to the heart of the matter.

So I was listening to a Radiolab episode at work about whether animals have feelings like humans do. And they were talking about the idea that dogs feel guilt. A lot of dog owners say that their dog gets a guilty look when it has done something wrong. So there was an experiment on a group of dogs and their owners. Half of the dogs in the group did something naughty, the other half didn't, but all the owners were told that their dog did do something bad. So the owners went in and scolded the dogs, you know, angry voice and face and say "bad dog" or "no" or something. And all the dogs did the face of ":C I sorry". And they then concluded that it doesn't matter what the dog thinks it has done, what matters is that it is being submissive to the alpha in its pack.

But the whole thing is just wrong if you know dogs >.<
Firstly, the scolding. Now I admit that dog training advice evolves and changes just like all things we know, but the last I heard was that you do not scold the dog unless you catch it in the act of doing something wrong. So for example, if you come home and find that the dog has chewed every single pair of shoes there is, or that the living room looks like a localised hurricane struck there, you do not scold the dog if you don't catch it in the act of destroying things. Because the dog won't connect the dots of "something I did several hours ago" and "human really mad". So it just thinks "human comes home and is mad :C" and that makes a very negative connection. So of course a dog that is scolded out of the blue will express submission, it doesn't really know how else to cope with this random aggression directed towards it. :/ It has a very limited bag of tricks.

Secondly, when you have been with your dog for a while and you are used to each other and stuff, and the dog is now trained and it knows what is bad behaviour - it will sometimes still do it (depends on the personality/breed of dog, probably). And when it does, it can have a look on its face (before the owner realises what has happened and scolds the dog) that clearly indicates "I did something I was not supposed to". My dog usually has that face when something has forced him to poop inside. He knows poop goes outside, and usually he doesn't poop inside except when it's just impossible to stop it. But in the time between his pooping and my discovering the poop his face is totally different than his normal face. It looks guilty, or sorry, or embarrassed, or some such. I can look at his face and know that he has done something that he knows he shouldn't have done. And I'm pretty sure you couldn't create test conditions to make this face happen, because it's so dependent on context.

So from now on, if any situation calls for an animated gif response, mine will be:

You know how way back in the olden times, people thought the world was made of the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. And now we have the atomic elements and we think "oh silly ancient people, thought that things can be made of fire lol". But... there actually are four states that those atomic elements can be: solid, liquid, gas and plasma.

I kind of had a little epiphany about this last night at work, and felt a little weird, like "this can't possibly be a new idea, but why have I not learnt this from anywhere?" Kind of like, why did I waste brain energy figuring this out by myself, why didn't anyone tell me? :P (Though I must admit it is very enjoyable to have mini-epiphanies like this.) So I'm just wondering, was this obvious for everyone else already and I'm just slow? Have you heard that idea before or did you learn it from somewhere?

Gift Ideas. A mere beginning, but it's actually one that I've been thinking of doing for years.

ABCs according to my browser

amenalready.tumblr.com
bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net
copyheart.org (huh, I've only been there once)
darthsanddroids.net
eksp.fi (:O sorry Elftown!)
facebook.com
google.fi (I don't appreciate it adding the .fi on its own accord)
hotmail.com
inariedwards.tumblr.com
j- nothing
klm.com
lds.org
mail.google.com
new.familysearch.org
october15th.com (again, only been there once)
posti.fi
q- nothing
ruutu.fi (same with this one, only been there once)
segullah.org
thisamericanlife.org
uudetkirjat.fi
v- nothing
wikipaintings.org/en/search
x- nothing
youtube.com
z- nothing
å- nothing
ä- nothing
ö- nothing

I think Vint Cerf should rule the world forever. >_>
http://www.decodedc.com/home/2013/1/31/episode-7-cerfing-the-net.html

*sings* I have a pokemon, short and stout. Here is its handle, here is its spout. When it gets all steamed up you can hear it shout. So tip it over and switch it out!

I like this a lot :) (stealering from [Triola]
http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-after-a-year-without-the-internet

I love it how he sort of states (what to me is) the obvious, that you are you whether you're online or offline, I really don't think people have separate personalities (unless they, y'know, have that sort of disorder) for offline and online lives. Which also means that I think that trolls are assholes in reality too (basically, the internet is a social place that lacks the social constraint that other people's presence gives us. So some people would steal from a shop if no one could see them but wouldn't if someone was there, while other people would not steal under any circumstances. In similar way some people are assholes as long as they on't have a tangible other-person-presence there to stop them. And some people of course are assholes all the time, to offline people as well as online people). Internet is just another social space, that has different rules for how to behave, just like one might behave differently with parents than with friends from school.

Sorry, rant over. >_>

Back to the article. I think he might have missed something good that he learnt there. In the beginning when he was offline, he was doing great. I've done that "take a break from the internet for a bit" and it really is great. So just because extended period of offlineness do not you a better person make, doesn't mean that shorter breaks can't be beneficial. And you don't have to cancel your internet to take a break, just don't turn things on for a while.

And you know what would make taking a break from the internet a lot easier? If you didn't worry about missing out on something. If your people did it at the same time. If my whole group of friends said "let's not use Facebook/Tumblr/email/something" for anything important or interesting for a week, it would make it a lot easier to think "there is no reason for me to get on so I really should just not turn the device on." I remember back in pre-Facebook days when Elftown was down, I had a very much of a "nothing to do on the internet" feeling :P

PS. When the weather warms up a little, I might go ahead and do an internet break. Because the balcony is very comfortable when it's not too cold, not too hot. :)

Story tiems! I had a really odd nightmare.

The thing had a feel of a night at work and pokemon adventure at the same time. So when I say "someone had told me", it's sort of in that pokemon kind of way when you talk to someone and they tell you one thing.

So I was at work (in my job I cycle around and enter buildings, much like one does in pokemon) and someone had told me about this really old and saintly woman who lived somewhere near here, and there was something really special about her. So during my work round, I actually found myself by her bedside. And it seemed to me that she had died. A really long time ago, actually. And I touched her hands, which were sort of resting on her chest, and she opened her eyes and looked at me. I was a little startled, sorry that I had woken her and embarrassed that I'd thought that she was dead. But she was really weak, and she asked for some water. So I gave her some water from my bottle, and I was a little worried how such a frail little old lady was going to be okay, all alone in this huge house with the huge bedroom and what not. But when she drank, she was like rejuvenated before my eyes, like one of those little plants that can be dried out and then come straight back to life with a little water, and I realised there was something really weird going on. And I got worried. And I made my way out of there as soon as I could, but I saw her getting out of bed all briskly and stuff, and I was rather freaked out. So I biked back to the work place as fast as I could, but on the way there I saw her on the street, roughly handling some kind of... things. Like bodies, but not people's bodies. More like... pokemon bodies I guess. And I was convinced that she had some how done some kind of magic thing, so that she was leeching my life vitality because I had given her water to drink from my bottle. And I somehow came to the conclusion that if I were to smash my bike light into itty bitty pieces, the spell would be broken. So I was beating the lamp against buildings, all the while hurrying back towards the office (I guess my bike disappeared here). And I got back to the office all out of breath and freaked out, and then felt weird because there were people other than my boss in the room, and everyone kind of looked at me quizzical like I'd interrupted them (this btw is the default look people at work give me in reality too), and I was sort of embarrassed and tried to explain, that I needed to give my work phone back because there was something wrong with it. And the boss said "okay...?" and as I was handing it to him, I realised that it wasn't my work phone but my nintendo DS and I was like "oh wait, I need to save my game", and the freak out sort of dissipated with the sort of normal surrealness of the situation...

But the old lady was scary as all get out >_>

Mr. Woollcott's appearances in the popular comic format:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns0RG5GA2_Q
http://www.supercartoons.net/cartoon/756/the-woods-are-full-of-cuckoos.html

Courtecy of Geoffrey, who has the geeky skill of finding stuff like this :)

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

I might... have to watch all the ones in humanities... >_>