sizi’s Neighborhood

Hello hello!
  As you all know, I`m in Brazil right now! Amazingly enough, I`m still alive, and even more amazing, I uploaded some photos!!! If zou`re interested, go to My Flickr

So, I've been dreaming some weird stuff lately.
Not scary weird, or prophetic weird, just 'whoa, far out' weird.
I won't go into the content much, since it's 100% incoherent, just as dreams are supposed to be.

Just to give you an idea, they included stuff like

• Slo-Mo effects
• Bullet Time
• When a character in the dream was reading something: a rendition of the content he read, with a slight, translucent overlay of the page that was being read and a voice reading the thing.
• People jumping around like they had just tried out for 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', had been sent away for being to unrealistic, then took a hit of benzedrine and jumped around some more in frustration.

Yes, my dreams make use of overused cinematic effects and clichees. I always liked movies with visuals like that, so I naturally see a lot of them. So it makes some sense to me that these effects would show up in my dreams, too. I also had a dream that used my World of Warcraft interface, although that might just be me trying to give myself a hint that I'm playing too much ...

Another thing that seems to be slightly unusual is that I often dream with sound. I remember reading that only very few people do that, presumably because it was an evolutionary advantage in the distant past to be able to hear your surroundings while asleep, instead of imaginary noise. So my ancestors have been lucky about saber-toothed tigers in their cave. Interesting, but nothing more.

BUT the part that got my professional interest as a slightly linguist is: that nonsense I dreamed last night was linguistically creative. The thing I remember, because my alarm was going off right after, was:

 One of the characters in my dream had, through a chain of events that I don't quite recall, planted his face in a heap of pig excrement. Upon getting up, he screamed "Bah, das ist ja Schweineducke". "Eew, this is pig ..."... well, pig something. From situational context, it was obvious that pig excrement was what he was talking about, but I'm 99.5% sure that I had never heard the word "Schweineducke" before. It's neither part of standard german, nor of any dialect that I am familiar with. And the only german word "ducke" that I can think of is a form of "ducken" (to duck) that seems not conceptually related enough to excrement to explain the creation of "Schweineducke". I really don't have a clue where that word came from...

I know chances of that are slim, given that only a small percentage of people do dream with sound, but I'm going to check now if there is any linguistic works about creating new words (words that make sense in context, not just nonsense-words.) in dreams. Very interesting indeed.

And again a post with no real content, but some linkage for you geeks:

A newly discovered comic, with style and content being equally geeky =]
Comic

And some nice make-fun-of-dumb-creationists-instead-of-shooting-them fun
I'd still rather shoot them

In the face
With a electrical stun gun.

Just to jump-start what is left of their brain.

Ah well, hope you have a less boring day then me =]

Pure Nerd
69 % Nerd, 43% Geek, 43% Dork For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Congratulations!

He must be, he said so himself on his blog

RAW Data

The man that brought me to Discordianism is gone, but his works and memories remain.

Robert, give my regards to goddess when you see her

HAIL ERIS!

New Scientist has a very interesting collection of short statements by big names of science about what will be the big scientific breakthroughs of the next 50 years.

See here

A lot of what they say is not all that surprising of course. If it was incredibly surprising, no one would predict it.

Like John Barrow says in his statement:

Perhaps scientists are as blinkered as the politicians and economists who failed to foresee the fall of the Iron Curtain and the climatic implications of industrialisation. Yet this myopia may not be a fault. Perhaps it is a touchstone. If you can foresee what is going to happen in your field over the next 50 years then maybe it is mined out, or lacking what it takes to attract the brightest minds. Nothing truly revolutionary is ever predicted because that is what makes it revolutionary.

But still a lot of the things there sound exctiting, a lot of things are there that I at least had not heard about, and some things that appear pretty obvious when I think about it, but I never did.

From Paul Davies' article

One of the great outstanding scientific mysteries is the origin of life. How did it happen? [...] Today it is fashionable to say that life is written into the laws of nature - easy to get started and therefore likely to be widespread in the universe. [...] The clincher would be the discovery of a second genesis on another planet, such as Mars. There is an easier possibility, however. If life really does form readily then we might expect it to have started many times over on Earth. There could be aliens right here, under our noses. Most life is microbial, and you can't tell just by looking whether a microbe is "our" life or alien. You need to analyse the chemical innards. The search for terrestrial aliens has only just begun. If they are here, they could be identified soon. And the discovery that all life on Earth did not, after all, have a common origin would virtually prove that we are not alone in the universe.
(emphasis by me)

Now that he mentions it, that is a very obvious and exciting thought, only it never occured to me. I'm very curious what discoveries will be made in that direction.

1. Final Fantasy IX 
2. Maniac Mansion
3. Monkey Island 1
4. Sam & Max Hit The Road
5. Street Fighter II

Found that on tiete

Just stumbled upon this trailer for Warhammer Online, and i can only say: I have no idea how good the game will be, 
but these guys know how to make a bloody good  video trailer

As much as i hate to admit when others are right about me:
I really needed this vacation. 

I know I wasn't exactly the most sociable type recently and hardly ever there to talk to. (or just in a rotten mood sometimes)

What I didn't realize was how much that was stress-related. I really needed some time off, and I promise to be better

Kobold out