The Doppler Effect

Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear?

The human body has some 10 trillion human cells -- but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing?

With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment -- which is still largely uncharacterized -- most of these rapid changes are not yet understood.

Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. "They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have," Foxman says.

Previously, previously.

spent half of the day yesterday and all of the day today with meredith_mccraw's fiancé Mark's family. this is the first non-nuclear mccraw-family xmas (except for kim delaying it slightly 8 years ago) in a very long time, like, since the 1980's. i wasn't sure how i felt about it beforehand, and afterwards, i just feel drained--i don't mind Mark's family but sitting around chatting for 6 + 12 hours was kind of too much. actually would have been fine with it on another day i guess, but it just wasn't quite as relaxing as i like xmas to be--no time for scrabble and napping, and i escaped to the bathroom to take a shower after dinner just to get some alone time.

i think we probably won't do double-family xmas again after the marriage--it was a pain for them to travel down here (from NYC and pittsburgh) and this was kinda a pre-marriage meetup anyhow. i wonder if this, though, is the end of our traditional xmases...which would be ok with me, because i am increasingly sour on the air travel. i love getting together with the whole family but as meredith_mccraw begins the childbearing, it's all going to change anyway so...yeah.

i guess i'm pretty blessed to have a family that i love both unconditionally but also practically, so maybe i should be sadder than i am. but i'm sure i'll still see plenty of everyone, somehow. just maybe not twice a year (thanksgiving/xmas) every year from now on. and maybe they'll come to me more, since they obviously don't mind travelling for the most part. so you know, maybe it's not antitradition but time for a new tradition of vegging out or volunteering at a soup kitchen or going skinny dipping. yeah. i'll work on that =)

in the meantime, i am very thankful for getting quality time with my quality family. i hope you got something you wanted for xmas--i have all of you and got a few nifty presents to boot. can't wait to give dark_knightly present #2 and casadedoom theirs. that's all the presents i bought this year (save for secret santa), and i'm good with that. yay less materialism & more spirit =)

Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.

11:06 < monsted>  _________________
11:06 < monsted> < Merry Christmas >
11:06 < monsted>  -----------------
11:06 < monsted>         \   ^__^
11:06 < monsted>          \  (oo)\_______
11:06 < monsted>             (__)\       )\/\
11:06 < monsted>                 ||----w |
11:06 < monsted>                 ||     ||

i look out the train window and see only a single car in the graveyard and one guy standing nearby, staring at the ground, holding a bouquet and holding himself, a still life with far more stillness than life. and i get to re-reflect on how lucky i am--nearly all of my loved ones are still with me. friends, i've lost one in my life. relatives, i've lost only the ones i don't know very well (and i am blessed with more friends and more family than the average fool..) i guess you can't be lucky forever, statistics say that my friends circle has gone too long--we're way ahead of the MTBF curve, but i'll keep hoping that shit doesn't happen. success!

inbox 172 is the best it's looked for months ande a hundred smaller than when i started working on it two hours ago, but all of those 172 deserve action, further thought, and likely some reply (some from as far in the past as 2 years ago :/). it probably speaks to something about my involvement in LJ that over a hundred of those (mostly older ones) are LJ comment threads to which i intended to reply to with some depth. i count this as a failure, but hey, i can fix it anytime, right? i can stop drinking anytime, too...


serendipity in austin meetups has been intense. i've seen a lot of folks i came to see--chicafantasma, jessimonsta, shaynabelle, missingwatch, rondanskin, meredith_mccraw and junkmenudo_rss was my first 36 hours or so, and the serendipity was finding that a long-known and little-chatted acquaintance is growing an orchard--so i stopped by with jeff between a couple of social obligations and found some encouragement for doing this whole tree-growing thing on the cheap and easy--just try a lot and stick with what works. hopefully toasthaste will help me formulate a slightly more in-depth plan.

additionally i got a bonus meeting with xomox and shubbe while i was wandering around campus killing some time. it's always great to see them even if our paths are so-far separated for the most part these days!

thenn there was some dinner with green_pheasant and missing of linearb who was scheduled to be there with us, but we caught up with him later on, so at least there's that! then what was one of my favorite events of the whole trip, a couple of hours of heart-to-heart talking with my old writing group (incl audissius, deannaroy, and signor_ferrari, capped off nicely at sheilagh's solstice festivities where i got an hour of the squeak and xacat show (plus of course sheilagh and others i never managed to connect with in my post-silverchat days, like litch). tuesday was a lot calmer until the evening, which featured a highly nonsuck happy hour with the old (what, 10 years now, bermanism?) DRK101 crew, in which we roped in sheilanova plus some others who are always great to see and get drunk with...

weds was largely friends older than LJ (i met gavino, scott, and jeff in 1994. holy crap.), relaxing and eating everything i'd so far missed (barbecue and blue bell for the win!) before a nice relaxed evening with chicafantasma. we dined on breakfast tacos this morning and realized my credit card had been left at the bbq place, and then i got on the train anyway, cos it was leaving. ohwell. stage 2 of xmas trip, with $5 in my pocket and nothing more. we'll see how this goes!

next time i should make a conscious effort to meet up with more of my rarely-seen friends whom i miss a lot--bigreddot, bikers_are_hot, neutron, mr_skullhead and the GYMO crowd, plus the nucleartacos crowd, and more. fortunately next time is soon--see you folks in march, i hope!

Slumming on lolfbmoments.com:

• "Ladies and Gentlemen... my sister is a whore."
• "Werewolf."
• "Thundercats."
• "Sunglasses."

Overtime by Charles Stross.

I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds.

Besides the obvious benefits to this, one great side effect is that you never, ever see the output of applications (e.g., quiz results) or the other useless noise like "so-and-so is now friends with someone else you already know". The only drawback I've found is that you also don't see notifications about photos that your friends have uploaded. (You do see links that they post, however: just not Facebook-hosted photos. It's a bizarre omission.)

Anyway, I just had to explain to someone how to accomplish this feat, which made me realize how completely non-obvious Facebook has made this. Finding these feeds is a complete pain in the ass. They've really gone out of their way to hide the URLs you need to use.

So. You have to subscribe to three or four different feeds.

1. Posts: Find the Posts feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php. On the upper right of the page is a gray box, and at the bottom of that box is a link entitled "My Friends' Links" with the RSS logo next to it. Copy that URL. Subscribe to it in your feed reader. This is the RSS URL for any links and (external) images that your friends post.

2. Notes: Find the Notes feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things that your friends post via the "Notes" app, which is (I guess) the more blog-like way of posting long things to Facebook.

3. Notifications: Find the Notifications feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things like "so-and-so commented on your status". You might not care to subscribe to this one because you can get all of these kind of notifications in email.

4. Status Updates: This is the RSS URL for the "What are you doing?" Twitter-like part of Facebook. This is the one you probably care about, and it is trickier, because Facebook no longer links to the feed URL! Nice one guys. You have to construct this URL by editing one of the above URLs. E.g., take the "Notes" URL and change the part of the URL that says "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Keep the parts of the URL before and after that, including the magic numbers at the end.

There. Wasn't that SIMPLE?

Previously: How to use Livejournal with a feed reader.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the holiday cheer continues apace.

i actually think hannah may be the only ex who doesn't live in texas. funny thing though, i've seen three of my exes here since i arrived in austin 2 days ago, and remembered some of the things i loved about all of them. they're all happy and in good spirits for the most part, though as is the human condition, none of us are perfectly happy. but as i was telling missingwatch, i don't think perfection is really desirable--we need a little struggle to keep us engaged. even the dalai lama said that mosquitoes still upset him, and he's probably the most at-peace person who isn't a total hermit on this planet. so there's that.

i'm laying in the st. augustine grass in front of the littlefield house on the UT Austin campus. (incidentally, i'm about 3 blocks from where the userpic i'm posting with was taken, in the 1990's. still my favorite coffee shop ever, RIP insomnia!) i swung though here because the weather is gorgeous and i love this place...it's a place a piece of my heart will always live, after i spent 12 of my best years here (ok, all of my years so far have been my best years!). a bit of the texture of some of my time here can be found in this post from 2004: http://users.livejournal.com/_fool/5122.html

anyhow, the weather, oh yes, you damnportlanders should envy me. sunny and 60, mmm.

today featured lunch with shaynabelle, and i'm about to head south on my velocipede to visit my favorite bike shop, then have dinner with an old dinner crew (wow, i think we started doing cynical geek chow in about 2002...how time flies!), then swing by my old writing group to pass out hugs and have a drink, then on to sheilagh's fine solstice festivities. yay a full but relaxed day in a town i still love a little. don't worry pdx, i love you a lot.

i'm in town for a couple more days, so if you are too and haven't seen me but want to & aren't coming to sheilagh's, try tomorrow 5pm onwards at the gingerman, where i'll be holding forth and drinking quite a lot really.

hope your holiday is turning out as relaxed as mine! no work = no stress = some joy.

Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises

Male bedbugs will schtup anything, and when they do, their stabby little penises can do great damage to one another. Female bedbugs have some "down there" armor that absorbs the punishing blows of the bedbug's love-spear, but males lack this protection. A pheromone discovered by a Swedish researcher can cause male bedbugs to kill each other with their penises through uncontrolled shagging.

Previous torture phalluses.

Eighth Graders In Oral Plea

A pair of Georgia eighth graders this week copped to public indecency charges after they engaged in oral sex while a substitute teacher was helping other students at the front of the classroom. [...] As part of the plea, sodomy charges against both students were dropped, and a probation violation count leveled against the boy was dismissed. After being held at a youth detention facility, the girl was released to her parents's custody. The boy, however, remains locked up, according to a law enforcement official.

I saw that in the latest PS3 OS update, they added Facebook integration. Now, there's one and exactly one thing that could possibly be useful for, right? You've already thought of it in the time it took you to read that sentence. The one useful thing would be to unify your friends lists, so that your PS3 can automatically know which of your Facebook friends are online without you having to search for and then manually enter all of their Playstaion Network IDs.

Guess what, it doesn't do that. All it does is make it so that the PS3 can spam your Facebook Status every time you buy a game, and every time you upload a trophy. Who would ever, ever want it to do either of these things?

I'll bet a "Social Media Consultant" was involved.

Fortunately the utility belt that was provided for him contained shark repellant.

A civilian passenger in an air force display plane accidentally activated the ejector seat while reaching for something to steady himself during a mid-air manoeuvre. It is thought he activated the ejector seat after lurching forward during an aerobatic manoeuvre and accidentally pulling on the black and yellow emergency handle between his legs.