Yogapalooza this Sunday

One May day, when I was visiting my college on a trip to the west coast, three former classmates said that they were headed to the gym for a workout. Would I like to come?

“Why not?”

It’s surprising how many bad ideas begin with that question.

See what they neglected to mention was that it was an aerobics class: Advanced Step.

I had never done aerobics, let alone an advanced class on step aerobics. It was a scene out of the movie—I kept trying to catch up as my brain tried to figure which one of the last moves we did was the “straddle down.”

Continue reading about [Yogapalooza after the jump]

Ogres Select Consumption Over Networking (OSCON)

It’s weird how worlds intersect. Here is some lobbycon dialog:

“I don’t know, but if you plot the points, there aren’t many intersections. I’ve noticed it on my Facebook: The Open Source world has different geeks, and then the Web 2.0 world is mixed up. Priorities are f’d—people like X, who are big in the Web 2.0 world, nobody knows here.”

“Web 2.0 is…not even geeks really.”

“If it were, every party would be like the Ars Technica/Gizmodo WWDC party.”

“Haha.”

Continue reading about [More OSCON dialog after the jump]

I think I found my class

Apparently, it’s the leisure class

Facebook friends with iPhone

I can’t hang it up without turning it off, they keyboard goes fritzy, Contacts crashes when I click on a name, battery life is a joke…but I guess it gets me into geek parties.

Next time I am outside waiting to get in, I wonder if I can just whip out my cell and say to the bouncer guy: “Hey, I’m with iPhone.”

Making a contribution

In condensed matter physics, there is an area called turbulence that has wide practical application: weather, golfing, navigation, bridges, building subs, boats, and planes.

(Most of you know turbulence from those random unexplained dips you get when your plane is in flight.)

But for theoreticians, turbulence is different.

In 1941, some Russian guy wrote a theory for the dissipation of vortices in highly turbulent flows:

Kolmogorov’s Theory on the disipation of vortices

Since then…nothing. Any significant contribution to turbulence has been beyond smartest minds in theoretical physics, despite the describing equations discovered by 19th century classical physics.

In physics, we like to say:

Turbulence is the graveyard of great physicists.

Continue reading about What are you afraid of? after the jump.

Great taste tastes great

At San Francisco Brewing Company:

View from a room

View from a room
San Francisco Brewing Company, Financial District, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G
1/60sec @ f/2.8, iso1600, 24mm (24mm)

I grab Marie’s glass and drag it toward me. “It smells like you squeezed a whole lemon.” I take a sip. “That’s way too sour! You should get another one.”

“Nobody can squeeze that much lemon.”

“The lemon is only there to cut the taste of the unfiltered yeast.”

Continue reading about beer talk after the jump

Unfortunate names

In college, I had a classmate and friend, Richard Chiu.

It hurts me to confess it, but it was two years before I dawned on me he had been given a most unfortunate name.