Geeky Cat Miusings

How much do you think you can tell about a person just by looking at them? Do you think you would be able to sense that a person is a killer just by looking at his eyes? Quite often when I see a murderer on TV I think that the person “looks” like he would do the dirty deed - sometimes there is something dark and sinister about his or her eyes. I don’t think we should start convicting people just based on their looks (I don’t think people just go out and kill just because they took a look in the mirror and saw their killer eyes), but you can test your skills by taking this killer quiz.

Have you ever wanted to disappear in a black hole? I do think about it. After looking at this cool black hole animation I discovered that if you were watching me fall into the black hole, you would see me get closer and closer to the horizon. But no matter how long you wait, you would never see me reach the horizon because the light that I am emitting takes longer and longer to climb back out to reach you. And so even though a long time has passed since I went through the horizon, the light telling you that I have fallen in won’t reach you for a very long, infinitely long time. Sounds like a trip to end all trips!

Did you hear that Microsoft To Buy Facebook For $6 Billion? They turned down attempts by Yahoo in 2006 to buy the company. All I can do is speculate as to what will happen, but it sure will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

The dress code is becoming much more casual than it once was. Jeans were once considered casual but now jeans are worn everywhere and even track pants and lounge wear are becoming the norm. But do you think committing a robbery in your pajamas is just a little bit under dressed considering that there might be cameras taking your photograph?

Here is something for Milene: Have a look at this Low Impact Woodland Home. It took 4 months to build, it was inexpensive, and is designed to have low impact on the environment. Someone had some very neat ideas for conservation - the fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations!

It had to happen sometime, but not by someone I never heard of - Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim is the world’s richest man, worth an estimated $67.8 billion. He has dethroned Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates from the spot in June, according to a respected tracker of Mexican financial wealth on Monday. That is a lot of wealth there. If he could find it in his heart to donate 1 millionth of that to my I haven’t had a vacation since 2001 fund - I could take a much needed vacation every year, for the next 25 years with that money. I, in return, could donate 1 millionth of my salary to someone in need of a vacation (unfortunately, it would not be enough to get them out the door). Puede la buena fortuna estar con usted.

I attended my first drawing class this week and the teacher said that she would know what we are thinking by the way we draw. Boy, am I afraid! I must clear my head of all extraneous thoughts such as kitties, cats, and moodle (some how Blackboard was in there too).

After much seeking (well, really just thinking about it), I have finally found edamame beans. Ever since I had them on a patio on Bloor Street I have just been dreaming of them - they are a delicious snack. They are green soy beans. It’s said that proteins in edamame with vitamins C and B1 help the resolution of alcohol. So, it can be said to be reasonable to drink beer, eating boiled edamame. So yummy!

The Fringe Festival is on! I saw the comedy, Dishpig which is an actual word in the Urban Dictionary. This is what it says: A dish pig is a person who works in the kitchen of any industry, but does anything but cooking. i.e. cleaning dishes, cooking equipment, floors etc. Usually student Chefs. The show synopsis stated that it was about the glories of dish washing - something I do every day and could use some helpful tips for making it a glorious experience. No tips, but it was very funny and I have some jokes I might tell you about when I see you.

1. In the late nineteenth century fashionable women were taught to practice saying words that began with the letter p so that their mouths would pucker as they discussed prunes and prisms with desirable bachelors. I have tried it myself and saying “Paris” does indeed cause my mouth to pucker.
2. Many doctors have made mistakes in their treatment of patients but never get sued while some highly skilled doctors are sued a lot - the reason why some get sued and others don’t is because people don’t tend to sue doctors they like.
3. You should not use certain words in your blog: they tend to attract a lot of spam comments. Obviously I will not say them here but anything suggestive, such as this blog entry, is prime target.
4. Over 19,000 Americans die each year in alcohol-related crashes. If a vehicle defect or food contamination caused some 50 people to die, there would be an uproar - everyone would be talking about it and criticizing everyone involved. Where is the uproar?
5. Cellphones are the new cigarettes. People like to flutter their hands - it used to be cool flicking cigarettes - now it is cellphones. Think about the poses people strike with cellphones. If you aren’t using a cellphone you are probably way too stationary. Just watch people with a cellphone: first is the grand pull out from the pocket, they flip it open to see if there are any missed calls that they could have been attending to instead of the bore in front of them, the hands flutter expressively as they punch in some numbers, all eyes are on the phone scanning it for tell tale signs of owner’s status and taste, they flick the phone shut, and then they lay it down beside their drink. Uncanny similarity.
6. Penguin Books experimented on a fully collaborative wiki novel, A Million Penguins. They discovered that you can’t have any sort of coherent trajectory when everyone has a different idea of how the story should develop and end. A fun experiment, I am sure. I tried something like that a few years back when I collaborated writing a witch tale with my niece, Sara. And that was just two of us writing in the same room but we had different ideas of where the story should go and just how much silliness is acceptable.

1. Facebook, the online social utility, has enticed more than 550,000 Torontonions to join, about 10 per cent of the Greater Toronto Area population, making it the largest usergroup of any city in the world. Toronto’s network now has more members than Chicago’s and New York’s combined.
2. Much of the dust that settles about the home is dead skin. Dead skin makes up about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere. Our skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute.
3. The word “eleven” comes from the Old English endleofan, which means one left over.
4. Humans also have a vomeronasal organ that has sensory neurons that detect distinct chemical compounds. I have long known that cats and other animals use the organ to detect pheromones. They sometimes make a funny facial movement called flehmen to direct the scent to this organ. I wonder if the funny faces some humans make is related…?
5. There are many squirrels with large bald areas around Toronto, probably due to one of two things. A female squirrel who is about to have a baby will line her nest with chunks of her own hair - the bald patches are usually found around the shoulders. The second possibility is that the poor squirrel suffers from mange, caused by burrowing mites, which causes the animal to rub itself and lose its fur which in turn can cause infection and hypothermia.
6. If the Toronto firefighters receive a call for a three- or four-alarm fire, a snack truck is also sent to the scene to feed the firefighters.
7. Taste of Little Italy takes place from June 15^th to June 17^th - a great event to enjoy good food, free music and entertainment.
8. Work can be a lot of fun - I didn’t really just learn this now, but I wanted you to know.
9. I may love the heat but my computer hates it - it just overheats and shuts off. What am I going to do about this problem with summer just starting???
10. White asparagus and green asparagus are the same plant - the white asparagus has been deprived of sunlight by mounding mulch around it.

1. The moon is a quarter the diameter of the Earth and thus provides a steading gravitational influence on our planet - it keeps the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle needed to support life.
2. Scientists believe that the Moon was created when an object the size of Mars slammed into Earth and blew out material which clumped together to form the moon.
3. Raindrops would pound us senseless if we didn’t have the atmosphere to slow them down.
4. The larger the star, the more rapidly it burns. So, if our sun happened to be ten times larger, it would have burned out after ten million years instead of ten billion years and humans would never have made it on the scene. Our sun is about 5 billion years old.
5. The elements an organism needs is dependent on their evolution. Cattle evolved in areas of Europe and Africa where coper was abundant and therefore they need quite a lot of it. Sheep evolved in areas of Asia Minor where copper levels were poor and therefore require less - if there is excess copper in their food it accumulates in their liver with toxic effects. It is funny to think that sheep and cattle now graze side by side.
6. The flattened top of a storm cloud is located at the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere - an invisible ceiling in our atmosphere.
7. An asteroid travels at such high velocity that when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere, the air beneath it wouldn’t be able to get out of the way but would be compressed - compressed air is fantastically (60,000 Kelvin) hot and would blast everything within 150 miles to oblivion in an instant.
8. Ancient Egyptians used crocodile dung as an ingredient in a spermicide to prevent pregnancy.
9. Yellowstone is a supervolcano - sitting upon a massive reservoir of molten rock that heats all the geysers, hot springs, and popping hot pots. The pressure of magma on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone 1,700 feet higher than it would have been.
10. The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered much of the nineteen western states and parts of Canada and Mexico - if you shoveled the ash up it would bury New York State to a depth of sixty-seven feet.