If I find a quiz I enjoy, I’ll just share it. Today, the quiz is “Can you name the city that each metro/subway system is located in, based on the names of three of its stations?“. For this one, you’ll have to select the blank that you’re trying to answer, since otherwise you could just start spamming famous cities. The reason I found this one interesting is that I got 28/32 correct, even though I had only ridden on 10 of them. You can tell a lot, just based on the names and character set.

Visiting them is “interesting”, mostly due to their two young boys, Nile (20 months when I visited) and Cyrus (3 months), who are slowly draining their parents’ sanity. This was actually my first time meeting Cyrus. He was still blob-like at this age, but I liked Cyrus; he did not fuss when I held him, and we had some good conversations during tummy time. Nile was a bit suspicious of me, but allowed me to read some books to him. He’s pretty verbal at this age, although Tina is much more skilled at comprehending him than I am.

We were pretty ambitious for this Thanksgiving meal; I convinced Tina to try out the Good Eats Brined Turkey recipe, which makes for a deliciously moist turkey. It turned out well overall, although we were hampered by not having a true probe thermometer. I also made a slow-cooker cabbage dish that turned out pretty well, and a sausage stuffing that was delicious, although I should have chopped the walnuts within it a bit finer.

Overall, though, this was just an excuse to visit Bruce & Tina, two of my favorite people.

Anyways, here are some pictures of my visit, which will probably be used as evidence someday by Child Protective Services.

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures And Descriptions After the Break.

During one of Cyrus’ naps, it was time for some quality time with Nile. Luckily, he can be easily amused. For instance, this sheeting stuff will do it.

Nile loves the vacuum, which worries Bruce in general, not that there’s anything wrong with that. That’s what he’s pretending to do here. The toy lawnmower is the vacuum, and the spoon is the hose attachment. At the end of this vacuuming segment, Nile goes ahead and does something much more in line with other boys his age — make as much noise as possible.

Nile likes to take everything out of the kitchen drawers, and spread it all out on the floor. You know, so it can be easily accessed by Mommy.

I don’t know if Nile is on X or something, but he likes to be rubbed. Even it’s by a flying child.

This video shows a number of lessons. For one, never do anything enjoyable for a small child, or else they’ll just want you to repeat it ad infinitum. Secondly, it’s not the tickling that’s awesome, it’s the anticipation of the upcoming tickle.

I think running backs in the NFL should try this. Run with one hand holding a football, and one hand holding a small child. It would probably confuse the defenses.

Children are stupid. This is Nile playing hide and seek. One of the requirements of having a happy Nile is some sort of outdoor activity. Bruce and I went out to play some catch with the football, and brought Nile along to play in the dirt.

We had a recipe for a cranberry-based dipping sauce that we wanted to try out, so here are a bunch of frozen cranberries simmering in a sugary fluid.

When Nile wants to be Dad, he jumps up on the couch, gets under the covers, and pretends to control the television with the remote. This says all sorts of great things about Bruce’s fatherly persona.

Stuffing, cabbage, baked sweet potatoes, turkey, corn, and some wine. A fantastic Thanksgiving meal.

I don’t quite remember all that he is doing here, but I think he might be shaving while he’s on the phone while he’s vacuuming.

I like Cyrus. At this age, he’s like a sack of potatoes. In a good way.

I like this picture because of Nile’s orientation, and the fact that even though his contortions, he is still looking at the camera.

There is a 50% chance that ball came whizzing at my head after this picture.

After coming home from work and dealing with a cold, Bruce was pretty tired. This didn’t really stop Nile from climbing all over him, though.

Nile’s parents got him this real awesome toy vacuum cleaner that he absolutely loves.

This night, Bruce took over parenting duties so Tina and I could go get some dessert at the Colville St. Patisserie. It was difficult to decide on what to get, but I decided on this cinnamony appley thing. It was delicious, although i don’t quite remember what it was.

This is what Tina got. I don’t quite remember what it was, but that looks raspberryish.

Apparently, this is the typical aftermath of a meal with Nile.

Tina took me wine tasting and chocolate-having the day after Thanksgiving. I don’t have any pictures of the wine tasting, but here is a picture of chocolate. With a design on it. I forget what the flavor was, but I’m pretty sure I asked for it based on the design. Update: Tina reminds me this is an Earl Grey Truffle, and I did a bit of searching to remind myself that this was from Bright’s Candies.

However, I did experience a problem : it didn’t arrive. Well, the tracking indicated that it did in fact arrive, but when I got home…nothing was there! Was there a thief in my area? Was there an incompetent mailperson? We may never know. Luckily, Woot believed my sob story and was nice enough to send me another Bag of Crap. This in itself was awesome, as I was expecting them to just refund my money. Apparently they have redundant crap in their warehouse that they were willing to send me.

See the video below to see my dramatic unboxing. Hit the jump (and scroll down past all the whitespace I’ve added so as to not spoil the video) to see individual pictures of my loot.

Here’s everything I got, all in one picture. You can see the three "bags" I got, in the form of the buckets.

I received a box of Burpmaster Pens (6 ct). Much as the name implies, this pen "burps" when you press a button on the body. The tagline states "Give ‘em your best — straight from the gut." It features three types of burps, named the burpula, the belly bubble, and the mouth fart.

"This handy pen is a surefire way to make your friends laugh anywhere you go. The BurpMaster is a pen with built-in burp sounds that you can call up at the touch of a button. Each burp was carefully recorded and is an authentic re-creation of actual burps."

This is a dual package of calculators from Unisonic. One battery powered, and one solar and battery powered. There’s two calculators in the pack, thus doubling the chance that I can get one that actually works. I received 18 of these packs.

While I’m not terribly surprised that Hyundai makes power tools, I’d never heard of one. Here’s the base for the 18 V 5-in-1 cordless power tool.

Here are all the attachments for the power tool. There’s the drill, the reciprocating saw, the chisel, the sander, and the grinder.

Here are a bunch of drills and tips and drivers and a saw blade.

In all, this was a pretty impressive haul. Looking online, I found prices of $5/each for the pen and the calculator pack, and $60 for the cordless power tool set, new. That’s an MSRP of $180, all told. Not bad for $3 + $5 shipping. And while at first glance these were mostly useless, it did serve some purpose. Some of my co-workers have young sons, who of course love burping. So I handed out some burping pens and simultaneously made friends with my colleague’s children and mortal enemies with their spouses. I also handed out a bunch of the calculators (the failure rate was indeed about 50%), which could turn out handy in a lab where unspeakable chemicals could come into contact with your fine electronics.

So in short, thank you Woot! I certainly appreciate this bag of crap, and I can’t wait for the opportunity to try it again.

As I watched that series (originally aired in 2007), I came across this segment, where the Top Gear crew pay an homage (of sorts) to the quality of British craftsmanship. It’s four YouTube videos (32 minutes total), and it’s just about the funniest thing I have watched in the past six months, perhaps even the past year. If you aren’t laughing hysterically at some point in time while watching this, I’m afraid that we can’t be friends.

Why has it taken so long for me to post? I had vague expectations of actually annotating and geotagging the pictures before posting them, but now I realize that is just a pipe dream, and I should post it and get around to labeling pictures when I get around to labeling them. It also doesn’t help that as much as I like Flickr, their maps for Japan really really suck. Since I grabbed Yusuke’s pictures as well (he has a nice camera, so his pictures actually look nice, and they are actually of people), there are a lot of images, so I’m not posting them all on this page. So there is just the slideshow below and a link to the Flickr page.

The general narrative is that there are a lot of pictures & videos of Itsuki, since she’s distilled cuteness (she enjoys cats, stairs, and phones). In fact, people have commented that my videos have a “Jane Goodall”-esque quality to them, as if I’m filming animals in the wild. That’s probably just as well, since she can’t understand me and would just take the camera from me if she knew I was filming her. There are many pictures within Tokyo with Becky and Steve. We traveled to Takao-san, Kamakura, and Oyama, but spent most of our time in Tokyo. We visited a cat cafe, so that’s where the cat pictures come in. Tomoko got married way back in March 2009, but she and her husband were nice to hold off a wedding reception with their friends until Becky and I could visit, so that’s why we’re all dressed up.

Flickr set here. Feel free to check back every few weeks to see if I’ve put in descriptions and stuff (Ha!).

Back towards the end of September, I visited The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, a redwood-centric state park a little bit southeast of Santa Cruz. It’s pretty much the southest I’ve traveled for hiking, although the trip took less than an hour, thanks to its proximity to major highways. Although the area stopped being a logging camp in the 1920’s, it only became a state park in the 60’s. Compared to a lot of the other state parks, that’s pretty young. This park is close enough to “civilization” that many people eschew the Park’s parking lot. They park at businesses that exist right outside the park and then bike or run inside, thus avoiding the daily park fee. I kinda think this is a rude move, because they are using the park while not supporting it. It’s also a tiring move, because even if you park right outside the park, it’s a long, windy, uphill climb to the park interior. Basically, if you park outside, it’s a 5k just to get to anything worth seeing.

Nisene Parks State Park was sorta disappointing. Not too much signage, so I often didn’t know where I was. This is especially true near the park entrance, where the trails meander and I found myself back-tracking quite a bit. There are some very long hikes available here, but I found myself wanting to hit trails that were really far apart, so I ended up driving between trailheads. The first trails I hit included really old growth trees, including some real monsters, while the later trails were ridgeline trails through previously logged areas.

Alongside the issues with trail signs, there was a real dearth of historical information as well. The pictures I show pretty much detail the entirety of the documentation on site, which was disappointing, because I like to think that I’m learning while I’m hiking. Also, one of the main reasons I picked this park was that the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake is actually close to one of the trails! There is even a sign! Imagine my horror when I got there to find out that the Aptos Creek trail was closed! A great disappointment. Whatever. Overall, I grade this place a C. Again, no one punched me in the face.

Anyways, enjoy the pictures, and Merry Christmas to everyone! I successfully ordered a Bag of Random Crap from Woot today!

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump.

Walking around the parking lot of the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, I tried to follow some meandering paths to find some Old Growth redwoods. These paths were ummarked and quite confusing. And in the end, it turns out I was nowhere near where I needed to be. But I did find this overturned, vandalized, overgrown car. Not sure what the story is here.

Again, while wandering, I came across this bamboo grove. First of all….bamboo? Seriously? I do not think that is a native Californian plant. When I’m near Santa Cruz, I’m expecting artsy hippies, not deadly ninjas. Anyways, this path was too forboding for me to dare follow it. I’ve seen enough horror movies to know what’s up.

In the redwood groves near the entrance station, there were a lot of extremely large stumps like this. I think that the original loggers cut down the giant tree in the middle, but since redwoods are a lot like vampires, that didn’t really kill them. In the intervening 80 years or so, a protective grove of smaller redwoods have grown up, like bodyguards. At least, that is my interpretation of history. I’m not going to bother checking up on the verity of all that.

I spent quite a bit of time trudging through the park in search for the Old Growth Forest Trail. I knew I was on the right track when I came across this creek and this bridge. Oddly enough I managed to make this all look miniature when I took this picture.

As labeled on the maps, this is the twisted grove. Quite freaky, not only because the trees are slanted, but because they appear to be slanted in a clockwise direction.

Frankly, I’m just impressed that I took a movie that I can watch without feeling nauseous. Not sure if it’s any more illustrative than the previous picture.

Again, it’s difficult to take pictures of very large redwoods unless I get very far away, and if I do that….I can’t see the tree. This ain’t no Avenue of the Giants. So this is pretty much the best I can do. Timed shots of me near the trunk. I checked out that gap in the bole, just to make sure there wasn’t something terrifying in there. The phrasing of this was weird, because it was called "The Advocates Tree", rather than "The Advocate Tree". Now, there was another really large tree nearby (that might be it in the background), so maybe they meant "The Advocate Trees" or just "The Advocates". With a name like that, I think that these trees are like the Godfather of the forest, making lumberjacks offers they can’t refuse.

After wandering around down near the entrance station, I got back in the car and drove up about a mile and a half to the location of the second part of my hike. I’m taking the West Ridge Trail out to Hoffman’s Historic Site, more or less.

Coming across power lines in the middle of a giant state park is somewhat jarring. Way to break the illusion, guys.

I can only imagine the amount of tedious maintenance that goes on to keep these power lines free of entanglement. I mean, you can see the path from Google Maps! Maybe they do the whole cutting-via-helicopter thing. I hope it’s not just some dudes with a ladder.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure why I took this picture. But I think I can make a decent guess. As I was following the trail, I was surrounded by redwood trees. But then the trail took a sharp turn and started walking along a different ridge, and I noticed I was now surrounded by Douglas Firs. As nearest as I can tell, this is approximately the transition point. Roughly speaking, to the right is redwood land and to the left is Douglas Fir-town. I find it interesting that such little changes in the environment (the fog probably comes over differently relative to these two ridges) can make such a large difference on what kinds of trees grow.

This tree was strange in that it looked like the bark was shredded vertically, but clearly the tree was still alive. I think that perhaps there’s a giant, mutant bear running around the forest, sharpening his claws on redwoods. I mean, just based on the empirical data here.

I don’t normally see redwoods go this buckwild in limb formation, but this park is full of all sort of mutant redwoods.

This was the entire extent of the explanation. There were no buildings around, no other signs. Just this marker. I have to say, a bit of a let down.

Along the way back, there was this display memorializing Porter House, a small residential area where the loggers lived. Again, this was the only thing around.

I saw a number of these faded scratchings along the trail. I figure that there must have been some sort of cross-country race going on, with these markings letting the runners know which way to go. I have to wonder, though, how fast these runners are going, because it shouldn’t have been that confusing. I mean, there are a bunch of trees to the left, and a bunch of trees to the right, and and a relatively open space in the middle. This isn’t rocket science. There aren’t a bunch of intersecting trails. There’s like, one. All this arrow did was make me feel vaguely wrong for going in the opposite direction. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s feeling vaguely wrong.

Over the past weekend, I caught this video up on Fark’s video page. I had never seen it before, and I have to say, I find it positively entrancing. I watch once a day, often more. It’s Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol , this video is from roundabouts 1973, and there are few things I don’t love about it. I love the beat and the growl of the guitar. I love the choreography and the outfits. I love the disco-dancing blonde (Should I have been a child of the 70’s? Perhaps. Without the internet, I probably would get a lot more done) Heck, I even like the horns, and in general I hate horn flourishes in songs (you can thank the ska fad of the late 90’s and early 00’s for that). It’s like something Tarantino would put in his movies.

However, the most fascinating thing about this video, in my mind, is that fact that it’s gibberish. He isn’t speaking Italian (except at the very beginning of the video). He isn’t speaking any language. But it’s not unreasonable to think that it’s supposed to sound like English, with its bluesy edge and faux-American accent. And because of this, your mind starts to try and make sense of and form intelligible words (as has been done with great success in some Bollywood videos). The Japanese have a word for it : Soramimi : mishearing words in one language (or in this case, no language) for another language. The intralingual equivalent is mondegreening, like all those people who thought Jimi Hendrix was saying “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.” Since Adriano is singing in something close to an American accent, it also makes me wonder if non-English speakers hear their own language or just assume that it’s English.

I am an ignorant American; while I know a bit of German and a slight amount of French, I couldn’t really carry a conversation in anything other than English. But I’ve always thought that if you had me listen to people talking in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian for one minute, I would identify 6 out of 6 at least 90% of the time, just based on what I know about the languages. What this video makes me wonder is that if I had each of those people pretend to be speaking in one of the other languages (Assuming it doesn’t just devolve into racist stereotyping), would I do just as well?

So why do I hate Tom Brady? Well, it doesn’t help that he played football at Michigan. My loathing of Michigan football is even deeper than that for Tom Brady. But it’s more than that. You see, I dislike all “good-looking” quarterbacks. Tom Brady is already a quarterback. He plays the most important position for the most popular sport in America. He makes millions of dollars because he’s actually really good at it. He has probably spent his entire life, since high school, as the center of adulation and attention. He should not get to knock up famous actresses and then marry supermodels. It’s just not right. If you’re going to be a successful quarterback, you should be homely. Otherwise, this is all just unbalanced. Booo, Tom Brady. Yeah, Kyle Orton!

Basically, though, my argument is seeded in jealousy and an inapplicable standard of justice. That’s just petty and irrational. Luckily, science has stepped in an gave me a plausible, legitimate reason for my prejudices! I think this study has been bouncing around for a little while, but I was only made aware of it recently. As this Deadspin post summarizes from this WSJ article and also this much older Times article (don’t know how long all these articles will stay up, so I’ll just link to all of them), NFL starting quarterbacks are unnaturally attractive. A group of researchers (David Berri & Jennifer VanGilder) looked at the faces of NFL quarterbacks and measured how symmetric their faces were. Studies have shown that facial symmetry is a measure of attractiveness that spans all races and cultures. It is by no means the only measure of attractiveness, but it’s one that can be easily figured out by computers and image analysis (as opposed to having babies of different cultures look at pictures of faces, and seeing what faces they spend more time staring at, which is seriously how research into attractiveness has been conducted).

There are two interesting conclusions from their work. For one, the symmetry level for starting NFL quarterbacks (I assume this is the 2007 or 2008 season) was always higher than 96%, while an average person has a symmetry of 90%. Unless it turns out that genes for symmetry are the same as for good quarterbacking, this suggests that good looking youngsters are steered towards the quarterback position, or at least the good-looking kids gets more snaps and attention during practices.

The second conclusion was that the more attractive quarterbacks get paid more than they should based on performance. As the Times article states :

To put this result in perspective, we found that a “good-looking” quarterback like Kerry Collins or Charlie Frye earned approximately $300,000 more per year than his stats and other pay factors would predict. Meanwhile, quarterbacks like Jeff George and Neil O’Donnell, who, sadly, were not found to have very symmetrical faces, suffered an equivalent penalty.

But it’s not the Brett Favres — the guys often referred to as “the face of the franchise” — who receive the greatest return on their handsome faces. It’s the QBs clinging to the bottom of the roster who get the biggest pay bump from good looks

So you see, my hate of “good-looking” quarterbacks is completely justified. They use their good looks to subconsciously curry favor with coaches and GM’s, from childhood all they way through to NFL retirement age. My “irrational” hate is merely compensation for the favorable treatment they’ve received all their life.

I’ve read the newspaper and blog articles. To this point, though, they’ve just been articles in the WSJ and the Times, though, and haven’t mentioned anything like “as published in the Journal of Sports Externalities” or anything. So it sure looks like this work has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet. Still, it supports what I believe already, so I’m inclined to believe it anyway.

Booooo, Tom Brady!