Thomas J. Webb’s Ecology Blog

Simple. Just 3. And if I don’t make all 3 of these, y’all can flog me. Serious

1. Live in either Santa Barbara, San Luis, Ventura or Kobe.
2. Have a steady stream of good income (actual amount/month held private, but it’s high, oh yeah)
3. Have a successful relationship with a human female.. that lasts through next New Years and beyond! If she’s a geek like me, that is a plus, but certainly not a requirement! Geekiness has a male-female gender disparity of at least 4:1.

Bhutto’s body flown home - CNN.com

Some Islamicist coward suicide bombed her. Nice. This could only mean good things for everyone!

英語のバージョンがもうすぐ。

１。お金持ちになる。俺もちろん出来る。ちゃんと１月にいくらかは秘密だよ。人生の目的はお金じゃなくて、人類のためにいい事をする。有名な発明家になりたい。けど、まずお金持ちになる。へへへ

２。優しいガールフレンドを見つける。前のEと言う彼女が意地悪で、遠すぎた！小さくて可愛いタイプが好き。黒髪が好き。日本人とか韓国人の女の子がめっちゃ可愛い！けど、もちろんどの人種でもいい。メキシコ人女と白人女も時々可愛い。ハーフもいい。一番大切の事は可愛さじゃなくて、キャラクターだ。一緒にがんばる女。自分の気持ちを隠れない女。頭がいい女。

３。 いい海の近くの所で住む。サンルイかサンタバーバラがいい！

これは来年の目的。

Generic ideas. Idea templates. Not out of the box complete ideas, but rather generic concepts, taken from a wide variety of fields such as philosophy, the sciences, business, etc, stripped of specifics (though a book on this would give them as a history of the idea), so that it can easily be applied to different fields. This is similar to templates in C++ and other object oriented languages. Much of what makes many ideas great are in the logic structure. If an “idea” only applies to just one field, it may well be an observation, not an idea.

My machine will automate what polymaths of old (yes, they don’t exist anymore, though technology has made an unprecedented number of people think they are) did with their artful analogies. Much “innovation” is doing nothing more than this and I, myself, am good at tricking people into thinking I’m smart by, e.g., turning a joke from South Park into an insight into computer science. So take this as a warning, you people who think you’re smart - use your noggin, or I will replace you with a perl script.

Example forthcoming. Watch this space.

世界にアメリカの文化のクリスマス祝日が有名です。けど、人があんまり歴史のことが分かりません。けど、本当に面白いですよ！

クリスマスの本来の意味はイエスの誕生日じゃありませんでした。本当にだれもイエスの誕生日がいつだったか知りません。けど、ほかの昔の宗教のミトラ教のミトラの誕生日は１２月の２５日でした。４００年ぐらい、キリスト教の教会が初めてクリスマスの式を出ていました。ミトラ教を真似ましたね！

後は北のヨーロッパがキリスト教化されていた時、人々がとにかくペーガンの祝日のユールを祝ってた。神父とかが怒ったけど、止められなかった。だから、その祝日をイエス化しました。だから、クリスマスは今でも、いろんなヨーロッパのペーガンのものがあります。 (more…)

Have your sacrifice to Freyr (Christmas Ham), make love-play under the sperm-dew plant (Mistletoe, this one’s kinda a stretch), light your piece of Yggdrasil (Great Ashen Fagot, only slightly a stretch), leave gifts for Odin and his 8-legged horse, slepnir (Santa Claus, yes, really), and enjoy your seasonal merrymaking, you filthy, filthy heathens.

Further Reading:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1937JRASC..31..347C
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/598
http://books.google.com/books?id=1XRjAyL8LogC&printsec=frontcover

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This is the season (not the time of the year, you Northern Hemisphere-centric jerks!) where families get together to relax, to be comfortable, and to feast. In Australia, where Christmas lands in Summer, they celebrate “Yulefest” in Winter. Christmas existed before any Jesus was shoehorned in (the Christian Christmas only dates back to the 4th century or so) and persists without. The true meaning of Christmas isn’t supernatural. Celebrations for Winter Solstice or other Winter holidays around the world follow the same basic pattern of family holiday in the Winter. There are countless differences with regard to the supernatural and, interesting though they may be, and as difficult as it would be to shut me up about them, they aren’t important here.

What matters is Winter is a time of famine and a time of cold. Just when you need more calories to stay warm, there’s less food available. You might hibernate, like the bears in the forest near where I live or my pet, ugh, “Mediterranean” Tortoise. But like many Animals, we humans stay awake, but lower our energy levels to conserve resources (probably.. what am I, a doctor?)

Except the famine and cold thing doesn’t matter so much, at least not to anyone who’s able to read this. If you can afford a computer, you’ll survive through the winter, even if you run around and eat less. But psychologically, we all still need at least some time off, even if physiologically we can handle year-round stress. Ugh, the fact that I’m working this week is notwithstanding; I invoke the “do as I say, not as I do” doctrine.

So, the true meaning of Christmas is family/socializing, eating, and being very lazy. Isn’t what you’re doing or really wanting to do right now in some way revolving around these three things? So now that you’re done standing in long lines getting people things they’ll never use or appreciate you for, how ’bout having some whiskey and a butt-load of food and bullshit about times past?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Not one but ’six giraffe species’

Apparently, molecular evidence suggests that Giraffes are really 6 different species, not 1. Even though their ranges cross, there seems to be no interbreeding. That would seem to mean sexual selection though the guy said they do interbreed in zoos…

So, I’m no biologist (yet!) but it seems to be if you allow merely being on the path to speciation some time in the distant future to constitute a different species, the term species will cease to be of any use. Isn’t this what the term “subspecies” is meant for? It seems a recent trend in zoology is for people to be overly happy with the splitting since molecular phylogeny techniques have gotten so much more precise.

Environmentalists also tend to favor splitting as it can turn what was once one species with only threatened status to several endangered species. Of course, going too far can undermine popular support. If the giraffe was endangered (it’s not currently), I’m sure public support for conservation would be comprehensive. But a more nuanced presentation like “lower Kenyan giraffe needs our help!” seems to only get more blank stares..

Here’s what I want to find out - when they determined that these different types of giraffes are different species, does the data show that they’re as different as different species we take for granted to be different? I know it would be hard to condense all the math down to a scale, but for the public’s consumption, something like “more different than a dog and a dingo, but less than between a dog and a wolf” would help us all grasp the concept. This is reminiscent of how we accept Pluto as a planet, though countless objects at least its size also exist. So what’s odder to have hundreds of planets or for pluto to just be a baby planet? What’s odder, for many species we think of as 1 to really be related species or for a single species to have subspecies differing significantly in appearance and having split apart more than a few million years ago?

最近いろんなおばさんにナンパされていた。すっごい怖い。なんで？？俺の顔が親父っぽいから？毛深いから？

いい若い子が欲しい。。。milf欲しくない。へへへ

昔の彼女のEはきれいだったけど、遠すぎて、意地悪だった。

I finally got around to making a Mac OS X keyboard to let you type Futhorc. I don’t know why I waited until just now (probably because it’s not important?), but it was really easy since they even have a program to automatically generate Mac OS X keyboard layouts, rather than typing the needed xml by hand. This is directly equivalent to the one I made for Linux, and by extension to the only Windows one I could find (see page).

Here’s my page on typing runes on your computer. It’s good whether you’re a Windows baby, a Mac fag or a Linux ass. It’s also avail under my code > type runes on your computer.

I whipped up a php class today to generate iCalendar files. I noticed halfway through making it that there are others (more like other, just iCalcreator). Mine focuses on just being really simple and so far, its output parses in everything I’ve used  (including Google Calendar).

Check it out here.