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And your goddamn humans. Fuck you all. Just fuck and die, you scum, you worthless excuses for biological meatbags. I've had it up to here with your goddamn grunting and shit flinging joined to that high and mighty additude as you all sniff deep from your own asses. Today was the last straw, with all your goddamn NINELEVENEVERFORGETFLYFLAG. Just kill each other off like you want to, because I know you all want to in your violent empty piss for brains. Because when 4 rogue actors kill three thousand people, why the hell NOT kill 80,000 unrelated people. I mean, it's only RIGHT, "A murder for an eye" and all that. And what did Jesus say? He said, if someone strikes you in the right cheek, torture a family to death and burn down their village. Any old village will do. Because violence is solved by more violence, just like two wrongs make a right.

Well I've had it up to here.


FUCK OFF AND DIE FUCK OFF AND DIE FUCK OFF AND DIE


(to infinity)

Because you made this happen. All of you shitstain pustules. And you deserve worse, with all of your petty rationalizations and moralizing. Which frankly sounds like shit frothing out a sewer, and smells just as sweet.

First, a Karner blue butterfly (Lycaena melissa samuelis) talks about it's plans for revenge against humans.

Here's the thing: I'm actually fine with going extinct. I've accepted death. Not only do I have nothing to lose, but I don't give a fuck about you, me, or anyone. And I certainly don't give a fuck about the people who are killing us off. It's kill or be killed, and I plan on killing a bunch of humans before my time is up, preferably with a couple shotgun blasts right to their heads.

You think I'm kidding around? Keep messing with my habitat. Keep developing land and messing with my migratory patterns so that my food sources become even scarcer. Yeah, just keep on doing that and one night you're going to wake up with a knife to your throat as me and my last remaining friends force you to watch while we strangle your wife and kids.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/if-i-go-extinct-i-swear-i-will-take-as-many-humans,21250/

Go!

I don't know if this has been posted previously.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

In all truth the best platform for learning mathematics that exists, starting from the most basic thing, simple addition, and culminating in calculus and linear algebra. /I'm/ using it, if that's endorsement enough. The videos are basically a disembodied voice talking over an electronic chalkboard written on in colored chalk.

If taken in sequence and mastered (as the site team intends with the exercises), every lesson builds on the ones before, and nothing is left out. I've searched around for other lecture series online that do this, and haven't found any.

Two possible objections: I haven't checked out the finance and humanities vids, so they could be bogus. The other is a complaint that this is like rote memorization without any questioning. But really, it isn't. The expectation is mastery, and in mastery you can take a problem apart, turn it any direction, and find the solution via multiple routes. Before I can properly question something like differential equations I have to understand the general concepts intended in solving them the standard way. Schools don't teach mastery these days, they teach to the test, and this is a real problem because people end up getting through school, maybe even taking higher level math clases (*raises hand*) and never really understands them, thereafter loosing everything they "learned". Education is learning for understanding and self benefit beyond the education process itself. So obviously, very few people these days could be said to be educated.

Let me break it down for you.

In the course of a nearly completely hostile universe of colliding gravity wells, high energy photon emissions, exploding fusion reactors 700 million miles wide and ever increasing entropy, 9 billion years passes and an 8000 mile wide iron rich magma font cools after taking a 26 sextillion killogram dump of a satellite, both orbiting a GV2 class fusion plasma ball, one of 10 billion such plasma fusion engines in this particular spiral-shaped gravity well. One of such 100 sextillion fusion balls in the universe. The iron rock spheroid cooled and liquid compounds condensed from iceball bombardments. Long chain molecules randomly linked in the cooling temperature, and due to complete chance some of these binded as templates in a self replicating fluid. Those that didn't replicate disintegrated from a chain of reproductive connectivity.  As more and more of these carbon and hydrogen chains linked, increased self organization and environmental separation lead to increased replication. And 4 billion plasma ball cycles later, some of these hydrocarbon systems have a physiological connectome complex enough to self-consider origins, and to react in intricate ways with environmental stressors, cycles called "suffering" and "joy". The complete set of all hydrocarbon systems that remain after 4 billion years are the few which were not selected out during the elimination cycles of mass extinctions, while other lineages were completely eliminated, often in random arrangements related to tectonic and meterological phenomena. In a second 4 billion years the GV2 plasma fusion spheroid this array is in orbit around will swell from the switch to a helium fuel economy and vaporize all fluid on the surface of the inner planets, effectively combusting and disintegrating all the remaining replicators, if there are any left. Even more distant, the collective electromagnetic energy in the universe will dissipate to the point where fusion reactors will no longer form, and the totality of space will drop to 2 degrees kelvin.

And in the 4 billionth year of the replicators who have self titled themselves sentient, they are producing stories to corroborate a vision of their centrality in the universe, despite sufficient technological augmentation to refute it.

http://www.openculture.com/science_videos

Title says it all. Via Open Culture.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2009/11/11/learned-helplessness/

In 1965, a scientist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.

He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov – the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring.

Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell instead of providing food he zapped them with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment.

After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves.

They figured if they rang the bell, the dog would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn't. It just sat there and braced itself.

They decided to try shocking them after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it.

When they put a dog in the box which had never been shocked before and tried to zap it – it jumped the fence.

You are just like these dogs.

If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you learn over time there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act – you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.

Studies of the clinically depressed show that when they fail they often just give in to defeat and stop trying.

The average person will look for external forces to blame when they fail the mid-term. They will say the professor is an asshole, or they didn't get enough sleep.

Depressed people will blame themselves and assume they are stupid.

Do you vote?

If not, is it because you think it doesn't matter because things never change, or politicians are evil on both sides, or one vote in several million doesn't count?

Yeah, that's learned helplessness.

Continued in link.

Fuck.

http://nymag.com/news/features/bradley-manning-2011-7/

I guess this fits under this subforum. Came across this through ZJ, a fellow queer I've been following on Youtube for quite some time now, and a main source for the information in this article. It's interesting, though I'm not really sure how to summarize it or the author bias. Anyway, there it is in the link.

Strom Thurmond. No joke. Yes, I've known about this for a while. No, I didn't know about this before I applied.

Phox was like, you're joking, right? 

Thought I'd just tell everyone (finally), for the horrormirth.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_vasectomy/

He arrived at the hospital around midday and met Hem Das, then the hospital's chief vasectomy surgeon. Das had an interesting question for Deshpande. Rather than receive a traditional vasectomy, would Deshpande like to be part of a clinical trial for a new contraceptive procedure?

Das explained that the new method did not have some of the drawbacks associated with a regular vasectomy. First, sperm would still be able to escape Deshpande's body normally, which meant he would be free of the pressure and granulomas that sometimes accompany a vasectomy. More important, it could be reversed easily, with a simple follow-up injection.

"I am normally not adventurous when it comes to getting myself operated on," Deshpande deadpans. But the new method sounded good to him, and according to the published studies he read on his smartphone in the waiting room, it seemed safe. He gave his wife, Vinu, a call, and although she sounded nervous on the phone, she said she was fine with it. Deshpande decided to try the experimental method.

When his turn came, he lay down on the table, and an orderly draped his lower body with a green surgical cloth that covered everything but his scrotum. Then Das moved in with a needle containing a local anesthetic. Once the drug had taken effect, Das gathered a fold of skin, made a puncture, and reached into the scrotum with a fine pair of forceps. He extracted a white tube: the vas deferens, which sperm travel through from the testes to the penis. In a normal vasectomy, Das would have severed the vas, cauterized and tied up the ends, and tucked it all back inside. But rather than snipping, Das took another syringe, delicately slid the needle lengthwise into the vas, and slowly depressed the plunger, injecting a clear, viscous liquid. He then repeated the steps on the other side of the scrotum.

The procedure is known by the clunky acronym RISUG (for reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance), but it is in fact quite elegant: The substance that Das injected was a nontoxic polymer that forms a coating on the inside of the vas. As sperm flow past, they are chemically incapacitated, rendering them unable to fertilize an egg.

If the research pans out, RISUG would represent the biggest advance in male birth control since a clever Polish entrepreneur dipped a phallic mold into liquid rubber and invented the modern condom. "It holds tremendous promise," says Ronald Weiss, a leading Canadian vasectomy surgeon and a member of a World Health Organization team that visited India to look into RISUG. "If we can prove that RISUG is safe and effective and reversible, there is no reason why anybody would have a vasectomy."

But here's the thing: RISUG is not the product of some global pharmaceutical company or state-of-the-art government-funded research lab. It's the brainchild of a maverick Indian scientist named Sujoy Guha, who has spent more than 30 years refining the idea while battling bureaucrats in his own country and skeptics worldwide. He has prevailed because, in study after study, RISUG has been proven to work 100 percent of the time. Among the hundreds of men who have been successfully injected with the compound so far in clinical trials, there has not been a single failure or serious adverse reaction. The procedure is now in late Phase III clinical trials in India, which means approval in that country could come in as little as two years.

100% effectiveness, 100% reversible, no side effects, low cost. How much better can it get?

Not by the content, but because I didn't know journalists could still DO perfect, cynical sarcasm.

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that "climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare." Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don't start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year's failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland's failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France's and Germany's current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It's very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it's reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there's no need to worry because "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations." I'm pretty sure that's what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

Has almost the same tone of the stuff we regularly write around here, doesn't it?

Had to post this.

Our fundamental problem is world destruction, caused by an irreconcilable contradiction between the natural world and the engineered world of industrialism. This conflict between nature and human interest may have begun with the first tools and weapons, but only with the triumph of industrialism has it become absolute. By now the creaturely world is absolutely at the mercy of industrial processes, which are doing massive ecological damage. How much of this damage may be repairable by economic and cultural changes remains to be seen.

Industrial destructiveness, anyhow, is our disease. Most of our most popular worries — climate change, fossil fuel addiction, pollution, poverty, hunger and the various forms of legitimated violence — are symptoms. If, for example, we were somehow granted a limitless supply of cheap, clean energy, we would continue and even accelerate our destruction of the world by agricultural erosion, chemical poisoning, industrial war, industrial recreation and various forms of "development."

And there is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use. Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places — precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted and destroyed.

Hard as it may be for a dislocated, miseducated, consumptive society to accept and for its pet economists to believe, the future of food is not distinguishable from the future of the land, which is indistinguishable, in turn, from the future of human care. It depends ultimately on the health not of the financial system, but of the ecosphere. In the interest of that health, we will have to bring all the disciplines, all the arts and sciences, into conformity with the nature of places.

Like other species, we will have to submit to the necessity of local adaptation. I am sure that somebody will wish to remind me of the migrations of birds, animals and insects, and also of migrations by humans from earliest times. Did these involve local adaptation? Yes; except for those of industrial humans using fossil fuel, all of these migrations have been made under the rule of local adaptation. The hummingbird successfully crossing the Gulf of Mexico is adapted, mile by mile, to the distance; it does not exceed its own mental and physical capacities, and it makes the trip, exactly like pre-industrial human migrants, on contemporary energy.

For humans, local adaptation is not work for a few financiers and a few intellectual and political hotshots. This is work for everybody, requiring everybody's intelligence. It is work inherently democratic.

What must we do?

First, we must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too lightly risk the lives of people, places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.

Second, we must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization.

Third, we must quit solving our problems by "moving on." We must try to stay put and to learn where we are geographically, historically and ecologically.

Fourth, we must learn, if we can, the sources and costs of our own economic lives.

Fifth, we must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature.

Sixth, by way of correction, we must make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence and local work.

Seventh, we must understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader or corporation.

This is an agenda that may be undertaken by ordinary citizens at any time, on their own initiative. In fact, it describes an effort already undertaken all over the world by many people. It defines also the expectation that citizens who, by their gifts, are exceptional will not shirk the most humble service.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-future-of-food-is-not-distinguishable-from-the-future-of-the-land/2011/05/05/AFhvN2iG_story.html

I had a major dinosaur phase in my youth. Really major, like, had big plans of being a paleontologist. I thought the raptors were the coolest thing ever, just because of their obvious speed and agility from their remains. One of my favorite books was Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker, a fictionalization of the life of a female Utahraptor in western north america during the early Cretaceous. I have read this book many times, and I had very distinct visualizations of every scene. This was even before Jurassic Park hit the big screen, but the way I saw these was very similar to the way the Velociraptor were visualized in film because that's how people illustrated them back then.

Fast forward 17 years later. Apparently, I haven't been paying attention, because I was looking at skeletal reconstructions today and found this illustration of Velociraptor:



I was like, WHAT?!

Back then, we knew about Archeopteryx, it was just a fact of life that it had feathers, but we all thought the maniraptors (which includes Velociraptor, Utahraptor, Deinonychus, etc) didn't have feathers. But as I just discovered today, there has been a lot of recent fossil evidence from Asia that shows probably all maniraptors had feathers, including skin impressions and sockets on the forearms where primary and secondary feathers would have fit.

So, yeah. My mind has just been blown. /Utahraptor/ with feathers...



/Deinonychus/ with FEATHERS.



And not just feathers, with wing like forelegs even!

I don't know how I missed this but it's like a sack of bricks to my gestaltspeicher. Almost feel like going back and rereading Raptor Red with this knowledge in mind, revisualizing everything /feathery/...

And if you knew about this, why the hell didn't you say anything?!? The only thing cooler would be if we found out tyrannosaurs had feathery coats. Not wing like forelegs, obviously, but feathery T. rex would be so cool to think about.

[when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!]

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, as different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

"The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c, will cease to be metaphorical and will have a plain signification. When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, or at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one with a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the posessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!"

"Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation."

"During early periods of the earth's history, when the forms of life were probably fewer and simpler, the rate of change was probably slower; and at the first dawn of life, when very few forms of the simplest structures existed, the rate of change may have been slow in an extreme degree. The whole history of the world, as at present known, although of a length quite incomprehensible by us, will heareafter be recognized as a mere fragment of time, compared with the ages which have elapsed since the first creature, the progenitor of innumerable extinct and living descendants, was created."

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become enobled."

"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

WHAT NOW, BITCHES?!

"Disintermediating". I just saw this word.

Goddammit. Humans get the hell off my planet.  

Since I passed my defense this morning.

Official graduation date is the 14th, and I still have one class to finish, but that's splitting hairs at this point.

One of my favorite quotes is from Antero Alli's Angel Tech.

Making mistakes is not a problem; repeating the same old mistakes is a problem and a chief source of stupidity. If you're making new mistakes, odds are you're probably advancing your intelligence.

When I first came to PD, I was naive. In a short period I made all kinds of new mistakes interacting with you people, which boosted my intelligence immensely. I was making new mistakes left and right, both fun ones and not so fun ones.

Today, I'm making mostly old mistakes. The chief among those is "doing nothing when I want to do something" or "doing nothing when something can be done". The other old mistake is "arguing with people who enjoy arguing for it's own sake when I don't enjoy arguing".

The point is, I'm stagnating here. I'm no longer increasing in intelligence under the confines of this site because I'm not making any new mistakes anymore. I've made all the new mistakes that can be made here, and I think that's true for more than just me.

I'm not quite sure how to proceed from here. Should I "flounce" in a quite unelegant manner? Well, I've done that before, and obviously it didn't turn out great. I've been writing in my blog (which now bears my legal name so I will not be posting a link here), and I'm sure I'm making all kinds of new mistakes. I'm writing about topics that don't generally interest PD goers (made that mistake before) but greatly interest me, and now that it bears my name other people will associate it with me for years to come, for better or worse. This could be a massive mistake, but at least it's a NEW one.

So, you probably won't see me much around here anymore. You haven't been seeing me much recently anyway. I'm on facebook if you want to contact me. I still appreciate all the friends I've made here, so I welcome you to write me a message or give me a call.

~Kai

I've been reading Dear Coke Talk since I found it in Apple Talk either yesterday or the day before (due to sleep deprivation induced memory distortion I can't remember which). It seems the advice centers around a few different points, the most prominent of these being "do what you want, not what you "should", and don't give a fuck what anyone else thinks of it".

Which got me thinking about PD. Many of us here like complaining, which isn't in essence a bad thing. If people keep kicking you in the 'nads nothing is probably going to change until you shout I'M SICK OF YOU FUCKING KICKING ME IN THE NADS SO FUCK OFF. The same is true of asshole moves in any realm of life. This is most definitely not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is this: If some dude, ignorant of what we talk about around here, comes spouting shit about wiccanism or pinealism or anything that doesn't pertain to the general discussion or zeitgeist, why is it that we spend 50 pages talking about it? Why do we give a fuck?

I mean, I can understand the enjoyment of farce outrage to an extent, but it just seems like a patterned reaction, a pavlovian response, that people don't really enjoy it.

So why not let the person just say their piece and ignore it? From experience, no one pays attention to threads that are halfway down the page with zero posts. He got his five seconds of fame, lets move on. Or not. I know I won't be participating though, not because of some moral obligation to let them go for 50 posts, but because it really doesn't pertain to anything I'm interested in, and frankly it isn't doing a damn thing against me. And it's fucking uninteresting, though that's just my personal opinion. An ignore button is unneeded if I automatically discard bits of unwanted information. Works for my advisor, my parents, my friends, and any old stranger off the street. And, if it continued and someone actually got in my face about it, well then, I'd be perfectly right off to say something about it. Otherwise, why do I give a fuck?

Preface: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=28487.0

Since I don't think I defined The Weird well enough in my thread over there, I'd like to give a firmer definition for all our Doktors in the audience.

The Weird is any aspect of the universe that is alien to what we consider our normal everyday experience. This is similar to Horror, except horror is more of a mental situation while The Weird is a quality of aspects of reality. The two are closely linked in that The Weird can cause Horror. While that may seem it significantly limits the contents of the Weird category, this is not so.

In our current everyday struggles, we have become like the residents of the Axiom in the film Wall-E, forever staring at our little tunnel visioned television set, as the rest of the universe passes us by. It's gotten to the point where, if we become aware for a second, we discover that The Weird is EVERYWHERE, because our mindset has become so alien from reality that reality becomes alien.

My associate Dkr. Howl often speaks of the Coming Weird Times. My research suggests that The Weird Times are already here, that they've been here for decades! Furthermore, The Weird Times are caused almost as much by the dissapated awareness of humanity as they are caused by active human doings.

This is the cover letter for a short series of papers on The Weird, how to find it, how to embrace it, and how to share it, among other things. I'd like to also address in these papers whatever questions about The Weird that come up along the way.

Signed,

Kai, M.S.

I remember we were talking about each persons life as being a library and that we need to record it, remember it, so we can understand.

I thought you would appreciate this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPBCxlx_SVk The woman is speaking about the same thing. Different culture, same topic.

Some of you here are familiar with the writings of Eliezer Yudowsky, I know. In one post on Less Wrong he discusses the joy of finding things out, knowing things that other people have already figured out but had remained a mystery to YOU until their discovery. Theres a joy in figuring things out, in making the mysterious unmysterious to oneself, the "joy of the merely real."

I'd like to discuss a similar concept.

Mystery isn't just related to known unknowns, the sort of things that are covered by things you don't understand but know someone else understands. It's also related to unknown unknowns, the sort of things you never expected, the stuff that horror, terrifying and wonderous, is made of.

The Joy in the Merely Weird is when you discover something awesome, terrifying, horrible, or just plain strange about the universe. Automatically your brain tries to push through it, to normalized it, make it bland and uninteresting, not so much by EXPLAINING IT COMPLETELY like Joy in the Merely Real brings out, but just the desensitization of knowing it exists. Like if someone found Dragons, and after a while most people would grow tired of hearing about dragons, even though they /just found out/ this really cool weird thing existed, it becomes mere with that superficial knowledge. Pushing through that brain switch trying to turn off the awesome lands you in the Joy in the Merely Weird.

And the best thing about Weird is that it's EVERYWHERE. Our brains have been so desensitized and channelized into ignoring Weird that we ignore it quite well. When I NOTICE the weird, theres a great joy in knowing it's there, even if I don't understand it, and I've never seen it in person, just KNOWING by some means that it's there makes me joyful.

For example, I've never seen a Collosal squid in person, much less alive, but I get the utmost joy in knowing even if I never see one, they exist, that theres a massive cephlapod the size of a city bus swimming around in the Antarctic Ocean with massive CLAWS on it's suckers. Even if I can't experience the Weird directly, knowing it exist is so good. I get such a kick out of hearing you all talk about your Weird. It's my extended mind, it's in my head and connected to it via our collective experience. And while the mystery isn't broken completely, it's still there (What Weird? WHY Weird?) just knowing that much is so important.

So, yes, it keeps us from drowning in the pressure of the Mudane. Not that reality is mundane, oh no, reality is full of Weird. Yudowsky would dissagree with me on that, that it's guilding reality, but I say no it's not. It's almost like this "having to know everything" (which I share to a fault) puts a tarnish on things, sometime. Whats the old saying, something like, can't see the forest for the trees? I don't object to demystification, just, why can't there be joy in Weird as well? Why can't there be both joy in Weird (knowing it exists) and The Real (knowing how it works)?

I'm bringing weird back. You better believe it.

Also, fuck you,

~Kai

Make some!

Now translated from the Russian. http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/270570.html

Concept: JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings can often be taken as a piece of racist propaganda. In 1999, Dr. Kirill Yeskov wrote a reversal of this story, telling what the war was really about, in real world terms of power and economics. In this light, Mordor becomes an enlightened kingdom of many races, with great high culture and learning, with Sauron as the enlightened king, trolls become the great smithers and miners, oracuen become sympathetic characters as people. Opposing, the Free Men of the West are shown as power hungry and cruel, horrific in their methods, and Gandalf as a racist fool. Dr. Yeskov reconstructed this story after finding ways that the Middle Earth maps and the Lord of the Rings propaganda don't line up.

A link to the PDF: http://www.sendspace.com/file/a75r7u

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d-qENAaNbM

Not my own fraudulency, which I can garantee you is no more than a complex of emotional imperatives to make me feel I'm not good enough for what I'm good at. No, this title is directed at a former colleague of mine. She doesn't have the best health, physical or mental, which I am quite empathetic of. What I am NOT empathetic of, is the fact that she has walked away after two years of doing absolutely nothing, for the same pay I get. Of course, my advisor is too nice of a guy to ever press charges; he puts it aside by saying something to the effect of "her guilt is enough punishment". Fact is, I don't think she really feels that guilty. I think she's a fucking liar.

So heres to you, you fraud, you asshole. While your fellow international grad student was barely getting by, coming all the way from asia for a masters degree and bringing her family of three daughters and husband along, having almost no money, you were pretending to do your work, and while I totally empathize with your breaks from reality, I don't feel the least bit of sympathy for how you walked away with a masters degree after two years (make that a total of 6 years to get your damn masters) of working, while by working I mean DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You didn't come back and try to finish, you didn't even make an excuse, you just walked away and never made any contact. Oh yes, I meant it when I said I was angry today, when I finally got ahold of you. I thought you were a friend. I knew you wouldn't answer a private message given your propensity for dissapearing, so I tried to cordially assertain your "whatever the fuck you are doing" straight on your Facebook page. And when you did answer, you gave me this "you make it so easy to shoot the messenger because you get excited about bad news".

Well TAKE THIS THEN: I'm fucking PISSED you got away with what you did, more or less stole money in an area of science that has so little, never finished the work you were supposed to do, and given the deadline for that work is March, it probably never will get done. You had TWO FUCKING YEARS to do it right, two on top of the four you've already taken, and you didn't fucking do it. Oh yeah, blame your mental health, but I've fucking had breaks with reality. THAT I can empathize with, given the person has some propensity for honesty and integrity, which I must say you lack behind that veneer. I'm fucking livid with how sick it is that you can just run off and let everyone take care of your shit. Good riddance.

Also, fuck you (for real)

~Kai

These last three days have been face meltingly awful for the PILLS, the sort of combination nausea, light headed near mania and pressured tireness I LIVE For, let me fucking tell you. I could just about kill a motherfucker.

Spiders? No, I got motherfucking WIND SCORPIONS after me, fucking SOLIFUGIDS, THESE GUYS:



And BOY do they run fast! They ignore me for the most part though, they chase the neighbors (the neighbors can't see them, which makes it all the more entertaining). They don't chase me directly, because they know they've already got me, got me happy, got me RUNNING. Gotta catch up, gotta run fast catch up stay in line don't loose my place, gotta graduate, gotta write that thesis write that publication sort those samples identify those organisms pass those classes sign those documents read that paper. Gotta look sharp, gotta make a good impression, pick up the speaker, drop off the speaker, pick up the refreshments, gotta be up at dawn and asleep for 5 minutes before waking.

Cause life is too short, you see? And the wind scorpions are after me, and if I slow down they'll catch me. And it's too much FUN to stop anyway, you see, it's like that guy hanging from a thread with a tiger above and a tiger below so he reaches for a berry and it tastes so damn GOOD. So I keep their beady little eyes just out of sight over the horizon, just out of jumping distance.

Besides, I can sleep when I'm dead right?

Thanks for the awesome snowday! I have so much work to get done but I'm drinking muscadine wine and don't give a fuck!

Love,

Kai

So, I'm making this wiki: http://keroplatidae.wikispot.org/Front_Page

It's for my research. The front page pretty well says the purpose.

I'm having a problem however. I'm trying to create distribution lists for this page: http://keroplatidae.wikispot.org/Nearctic_Checklist

They need to be on the right side and they should start in a straight line along a column. I've been working on that page for a while now and can't quite get them to line up. I can use the table option with three columns at 33% width but the ones at the left don't line up straight, they're all zig-zaggy.

So I was wondering if anyone could provide some insights.

Apologies if this doesn't make sense, I've been drinking whiskey water.

I've been thinking about this for a while now. I've talked about how the ICZN is a document of chaos, as it ensures a balance between apparent order and disorder. Now I'm considering how the whole of systematics and evolutionary biology echos this theme. Ecology has a patron, Saint Rosalia, of which Hutchinson first spoke (http://oz.plymouth.edu/~lts/ecology/santarosalia.html), so why not my science?

I've chosen the name Eris Concordia, as we well know our goddess is a personification of Chaos, composed of both apparent disorder AND order. Wallace and Darwin both recognized the Struggle for Existence, the competition (=strife) that exists between multiple levels of organization, and that this strife allows for selective processes. Thus some lineages continue and others are extinguished. This strife results in apparent ordered patterns (=concord) of life, groups, species, which we can then distinguish and relate to each other through systematic tools. I do not wish to invade ecology right out, they may keep their patron.

An Image: There stands the goddess, Eris Concordia, Strife Harmonic, She is modeled after the first Homo sapiens, dark skin and dark hair, and clothed in only a wrap. In one hand she holds The Quince, which would not say Kallisti, but "Agonistikoi", "To the fit" not "fittest". Selection does not chose those who are the best, only those who are able. "Whatever works" is nature's code. The Quince, symbolic of the Trojan War myth, is also symbolic of the creative unknown.

In the other hand, She holds a staff, a double helix, the order of life, topped with a branching tree, symbolic of the hierarchy and branching of lineages.


Or something like that.

Or,

Why I Hate the "Environmental Movement".


This may seem exactly the opposite of what you would expect of me, being a biologist. In fact, in the past I would have called myself an environmentalist of various sorts. And maybe, once upon a time, there was a good reason to do so.

The truth is, as the title may suggest, I despise the environmentalist movement. These days, whenever I hear a cry of "save the earth!" or "environment" or various other passwords, I step away. And the simple reason is this: the environmental movement is nothing more than a bunch of political hacks with half assed ideas and no real objectives or means for change, a bunch of hypocritical poseurs. It's an excuse for people to do minor inconveniences that makes them feel self righteous so they can feel okay about the impending disaster, the "it's not my fault, I recycle!" crowd, the "I drive a hybrid" crowd, the "I cycle to work" crowd.

The clean air and clean water acts of the 70s were some truly monumental pieces of legislation. Rivers in this country no longer burn and you can actually eat fish out of Lake Eire now. Industries were required to filter their waste, both gaseous and aqueous. We have overall benefited immensely.

And then, it faltered. Somehow, doing something became equated with putting recycling out to the curb every Tuesday and buying organic produce. Human morality is a balancing act of canceling good versus bad. You can easily see this with people who desperately need to loose weight and explain having a doughnut with "I walked a couple blocks this morning". The total effect is zero progress.

If the whole point of such "environmental" actions is to create a sustainable human society, these little things that people do are overall meaningless and pointless in the grand scheme. Recycling makes little difference if West Virginia is still going to have it's mountain tops stripped into a heavy metal wasteland. Buying organic makes no difference when population still continues to shoot up (now nearing 7 billion) requiring more and more land for agriculture which will inevitably become desert. Riding a bike to work, while a nice healthy activity, does nothing to counteract the millions of drivers still on the roads and the immense amount of methane released by cattle flatulence. And the worst one, PLANTING a /TREE/ does absolutely nothing about the ongoing biodiversity crisis and the continuous slash and burn clear cutting of forestland in the tropics, where millions of species are facing extinction before I as a biologist even has time to describe them.

So fuck Earth Day, fuck organic farming, and fuck bike lanes. And for fuck sake, FUCK environmentalism, because it doesn't do shit. It's all just hypocritical nonsense.

Me, I'm still looking for answers, because sure as hell none of the above are addressing the larger problems.

I started a blog last year for science musings, because I often don't feel comfortable posting things here. Mostly because I think it makes me look like I'm showing off intellectually, but also partially because I don't think dumping my science thoughts on here is much appreciated.

[link removed due to it becoming my professional blog; PM for more information]

I just recently got going again on it, so there isn't much there. However, with the way science blogs are turning into political/religious shouting matches these days, I think I'm not doing bad. I mean, have any of you seen Pharyngula recently?  

It will mostly just be systematics/entomology/biology talk. I've got many more thoughts recently about multilevel selection theory, species concepts, and systematics. My writing isn't best, but it's mine. Just putting it out there.

Systematics (from the German, systematik, a system of natural classification) is the study of biodiversity, in three parts: 1. What are the units of biodiversity (commonly called species) 2. What are the relationships between the units of biodiversity and 3. How do the units of diversity come into being?

In this science, activities include naming of species, classifying of relationships between species, and characterizing variation of all forms within and between species. With 1.8 million and counting, you can imagine that keeping things sorted can become a problem. Here we have the myriad forms, and here as well we have HUMANS. I think saying that should be illustrative enough of how easily everything can become a mess. Consider, 20 different jealous driven people racing to name all the species they can and arguing over who is right, not to mention all the groups /above/ species level. It got to a point in the 1700s when various groups of taxonomists and other biologists/naturalists got down and serious about forming some sort of rules to clean things up.

Today, in Zoology (the study of animal life), we have the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. This group of zoologist produces the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, called ICZN or just "The Code" for short. The Code is a legal document that keeps the whole of biology functioning by defining how and when scientific names of animals are considered valid. It's an offshoot of the earlier Strickland Code, and it's meant to provide stability to scientific names and classifications in systematics, based within the Linnaean system.

Opposing this important stability which allows us to discuss life and make sense of it is the need to revise, refine and do away with various classification schemes as needed. Without the ability to make changes, and also (often) cause disorder, the Code becomes a bureaucratic tyranny and the whole of the system becomes static, and therefore inflexible and prone to collapsing like all bureaucracies. On the other hand, without the stability of the code, the whole of biodiversity would become as much of a useless mess as it was before any formal system of classification.

In that sense, the Code provides for both stability (Order) and change (Disorder) in a homeostatic equilibrium. The Principles of Priority, Homonymy and Synonymy provide rules for stability of names, while the lack of rules about HOW to classify and the same Principle of Synonymy allows flexibility. It's a document of Chaos, just as apparently chaotic as nature, containing both Order and Disorder.


So yes, I work with Chaos. Beat that.

There are two things that matter. Our biological collective heritage as a species, as beings grown from the stardust of this planet. We are bound to this past the same way the universe is bound to the Big Bang. Part of this is our happiness, our understanding of what we are and were and using that to become all the possibilities of what greatness we might achieve. We store within us the wisdom of aeons, of ages of changes upon basepairs and transcription cascades stemming from the Primordial Mother. We here are the leavings of that past, the paintings of ancient reptiles, the artworks of the RNA world painted on a world sized canvas and constantly changing. We are heirs to this, our world, our shared life with life, we are curators of a great unveiling portrait of our ancestry. We collect and understand, we place in grottoes and crypts of metal vouchers of our biological history collected far and wide across the surface and above and within, we claim our understanding so even when the specimens long disintigrate we can say, we were there we saw that picture, we spoke those names, we understood the changes; we are holders of our ancestry.

We have our cultural collective heritage, our humaness, our cathexis in objects cast by monkey minds grown too large to be only monkey, we see our riches of what we have done in our explorations of ourself, our treasures of art, of buildings, of hammer and scraper and of our writings of understanding and misunderstanding. We trace the line of our thoughts back to when there was no thought, that second big bang, that second Eve, the dawning of our intent to know ourselves. This second artwork in so many forms we track, we preserve as our nature good or evil or both, we frame and place for all the eyes to see, we photograph, we cherish.

So when the fresco fades with the sun thousands of years in the future we can still say, yes, it was there, we have seen it, that is where it stood, that tower, that sculpture, that monument to minds, those writings long since copied. That is where they stood, place your hand against the ground and feel it, that knowlege, what has come before, we are here, it is us.

So,

1. Homophobe preacher comes to college campus.

2. Professor tells upset students to protest back.

3. Upset students quietly attend homophobic preacher's church service holding up pictures of gay teenagers that committed suicide.

And guess what? THE PREACHER IS UPSET ABOUT THE PROTESTING~!  

edit: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/01/mankato

A fellow graduate student walked into lab a few minutes ago, he said he was in his costume. He was carrying around a box of Total stuffed with candy and shoved through with a stake.

I asked him what he was dressed up as.

































He said, "Can't you tell? I'm a cereal killer!"

I'm all ranted out, folks. The "In those days." were a good run, while they lasted. I'm all dried up like a cow's tit in Wisconsin winter. All I can write these days are these notes, these schema, diagrams, outlines of experiments in hilarious taxonomy. My eyes are dripping and drooping, my skin is peeling. Damn football game, and that's got to me too. I'm a College Town FAN now. They converted me, sat me down on one of those hard benches and let me behold the glory that is sports heroes and I am. a. changed. man. Or something.

I think the napthalene has gone to my skull. All that time in a museum with dead things, with preservatives and insecticides, ethanol and formalin. I'm a goddamn biologist, right? Hows that, I spend more time in a catacomb than outside under the sun. Maybe its the football game, the sun so bright and full of glory my skin is peeling. PEELING, folks. The heat went to my head, made me senile. Put me in to pasture. Made me quiet down.

Not quiet enough apparently. I get my sense of BALLS about me, and sure enough, even the good monkeys start taking offense. No hard feelings of course, just monkeys doing the jealous monkey dance. So I say a little bit about what makes me feel good. So I brag a little about the good word from my professor, beaming, feeling that sort of gratitude, you know, the sort of a job well done. So I mention I wish I could have won that award, that I'd have it next time, that I was /this close/. So I compare and compete a little more. Word is, that's annoying, thats arrogant. How much more self centered am I really? All the REST of the monkeys do it. Maybe I'm not discrete enough.

I think it's both. The napthalene. And the football glory. My brain is twisted, and my eyes are drooling. I sleep less these days, eat less, have more energy. So I piss off a few monkeys. Just gotta be quieter about it. This sort of confidence, /crazy talk/. At least in this country, where only money talks sane and the monkeys howl if you step up to stand out even the slightest and don't bow when you're told. That sort of crazy talk.

Gotta break a few eggs to get shit cooked around here.

Okay, not technically my first. I went to a science meeting in Santa Fe this year and presented a poster.

But this was my first /bug freak/ meeting. And I gave an oral presentation.

Bug freaks and geeks are a big like werewolves. You know theres something weird about them, I mean, anyone who stares at bug dick long enough is going to get far more than the mental equivalent of hairy palms.  However, a couple times a year the bug freaks and bug geeks get together for these things they call "annual meetings" or "conferences" where they do three things.

1) Talk about bugs.

2) Get massively drunk.

3) Tell hilarious and horrible stories about their graduate student experience while unsuspecting graduate students listen in and someone in the background plays a bad drunken rendition of Margaritaville on an acoustic guitar, singing badly at the top of his lungs.


These normally mild mannered individuals, older ladies and gentlemen I've known for 2+ years suddenly come out of their shells and say and do ridiculous things and I find myself having, hours ago, shifted from merlot to rolling rock to bud in a can and I don't give a shit. THESE ARE MY PEOPLE. We may not have class but we are slick and can party like you wouldn't believe. These two old gray haired professors standing amidst the graduate students talking about when they bouncered for the Grateful Dead in the company of Hell's Angels while smoking the "wacky tobacky" (as the president of one state entomological society called it while chugging yet another beer). This was hours after my talk, which everyone loved. They said it broke the monotony, that even a taxonomy talk can be good if done right. Hours after I stood in front of the park building, dressed to the nines between 10 attractive young entomologist females and smiling because I was in the middle of the photograph, the president. And afterwards two of us were standing outside the party drunk, and she was telling me "I never wanted to work on thrips, I wanted to work of dragonflies, but Dr. M- had no money for me to do it" and I was telling here it would be fine, I was looking her in the eyes and saying that her master's degree wasn't the be all end all of her life research and that she could study dragonflies on the side, it would be alright, I said.

Even the massive morning hangover before 6 hours of talks was worth it. I'd do it again tomorrow. Something about being in one's own element.

or

I'm a hipster.


There, I said it. Every morning, I dress up in uncool, weirdly matched clothes, I go to work staring at bug dick, I eat uncool food, I listen to uncool music, and I read uncool books. I am the epitome of weird-uncool. Therefore: I am a hipster.

My solution is to take "hipster" back from those who mock the wannabe hipsters. Besides, I'm a hipster and I do it unironically. And no wannabe hipster wants to be called a hipster, because frankly they're just pretenders. They have to pull this ironic shit so they look like they MIGHT be a hipster but then reject it outright. In some pseudo ironic non-ironic irony. Or some shit.

Besides, I liked hurdy gurdy before it was cool. And still like it even after it is cool. And will continue to like it when it is uncool again. Isn't that, truly, the definition of hipster?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0&feature=sub

Excellent TEDtalk from Sebastian Seung, quite an awesome speaker, about the complexity of neural connection and current work and technology. I've talked about the true complexity of human neurology before, but this is much more eloquent than I have stated.

It hasn't rained all summer.

Suddenly, it's been raining constantly for the past two days.

What is going on here?

There they go, that sweet looking couple with the two kids, one in a stroller, walking down Main St on a Sunday afternoon, looking in the shops, giving big smiles to all the people who pass. They're a young couple, in their early twenties with nothing but time ahead and there's no rush.

But something is off, those eyes say different stories than their smiles. Those tired eyes, light rings of black around them obscured by glasses and makeup. The little girl dances around the stroller babbling about ice cream and toys and dolls, and they barely pay attention.

The husband and wife married just out of high school 5 years ago and had a child shortly after, they were both in college at the time she for education and he for engineering, they worked through it and purchased a home but something still wasn't right. She went to the middle school, he the refinery as what was expected by the matriarchs and patriarchs of the tribe.

There's something off here, this lovely looking couple and their lovely looking children, a typical scene but it feels like paper dolls cut out of a cardboard book with cardboard clothing and cardboard accessories. And after the walk they go back to their cardboard cutout house with all the cardboard furniture. The girl squeals at a stuffed animal in a window and while these two keep up their smiles they are both inwardly cringing, they can't escape from this cardboard world that they created.

They thought it would be fun, at first, such a great game, get married so they could have sex without their parents thinking bad of it, but then the children came along and the game wasn't so much fun anymore. It was still fun, but not as MUCH fun, less pretend and more real, less playing and more of this WORK stuff. They secretly hated the children, ruining their game but they didn't say it, didn't speak it not even to each other but they could see it in each others eyes, the want for a chance of a possibility of something else the idea that they could get OUT, escape this game that wasn't fun anymore. They had so many plans, like children playing dressup, like their little girl played dress up these days, all those nights of going out and boozing with friends and making pretend that the money would last forever and they would never age, that freedom that was cut short.

They keep their minds by continuing to pretend that everything is alright, that they are still in that wonderland of possibilities and that the world isn't getting more crowded and that they will still live forever, that it's still all imagination and playing and pretend, that it's all FUN you see, playing this adult game, the game their parents played, still play, the innocent game they got caught up in and now they can't escape.

It's all fun, though, right? Right?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/09/16/a-spider-web-that-spans-rivers-made-from-the-world%E2%80%99s-toughest-biological-material/ NOT SAFE FOR FRED AND SUU.

I'd post pictures here but would rather not incur wrath.

http://www.crispian.net/CrispiansScienceMap.html

Have fun looking at that for several hours. Don't get lost in the wikipedia links!

Also, note the three main nodes are Gallilei, Newton and Darwin. Those are very much like the fathers of science.

Today was the first game day of the football season for this college town. Normally I wouldn't leave the house on such an auspicious occasion. The population swells by over 100 thousand on game days. Consider, a little southern university town with roads, byways and parking set up for a population of 25 thousand, gaining an order of magnitude in the space of a day.

The traffic is HORRIBLE.

However, I had to visit the office to grade some lab reports, so I thought I would catalog the sites as I walked.

As I exited my apartment a large crowd of students were cheering in a circle around a nearby house, playing beer pong, drinking heavily. This was a mile from campus, an outside party of frat boys and other alcoholics engaging in pre game screaming. As I closed the distance to campus, I noticed more and more people walking my direction in colorful t shirts with sports logos. The traffic was backed up at the major intersections. Everywhere there were sharkers, people selling parking for 15-20 dollars a space, t shirt vendors, drink vendors...the town had exploded into this city fair microcosm. Tailgaters setting up their little tents with all their dishes and chairs and silverware in matching team colors, up on the lawns and in the roads and....well, everywhere. The four lane highway that runs straight through the heart of the town is turned into a one way street for the occasion.

The breeze today was something else. It was the first day I can remember in months where the shade was so comfortable. When entering the shade and feeling that breeze, the cool comfort was close to orgasmic, no, it was orgasmic. I definitely felt deep shivers.

As I sat and worked on grading with the windows open, I could hear people shouting, vuvuzelas, the band and stadium in the distance. You can hear the stadium all the way from my apartment, when they are cheering for a touchdown. It was quieter when I left, most people were at the stadium. I could still hear them.

The full experience required some food and alcohol, so I stopped in to the local beer pub to watch a bit of the game. I regret I can't remember much, as I consumed three drinks with way too high of ABV, and am now feeling the after affects. However, I do recall that there was some sort of joy in cheering. It's the whole us versus them mentality, the being a part of something mentality. The nation rots, but at least we have FOOTBALL, we have our HOME TEAM. Root, root root for them, cause that's all we've got. And if they don't win it's a shame.

Went out to breakfast at a southern diner this morning with three colleagues.

During the meal, a new graduate student came up in conversation. HT was telling me that she had spent some time with this girl, and she had come to the conclusion that the new grad student "wasn't quite all there". S (we'll just call her that) seems to have no interests, read no good books recently, watched no movies, learned nothing particularly interesting. It seems she likes videogames, but by games she means Pacman.

And so I was confused. How is it that a grad student in /entomology/ could be so completely uninteresting, boring, disinterested? Confusion indicates a place where my maps don't match the territory, so I would like to find out what the hell is going on with this. Maybe I'm just used to brilliant people; even a former master's student, B, seemed outwardly like a boozehound undergrad yet had an incredible ability for induction from details to the big picture.

If it's true, that S is sorta dumb, it pisses me off. I mean, even new grad student G who is incredibly socially inept, anxious and has a tendency to talk and talk and /talk/ is equally obviously brilliant and interesting. Maybe S has a rich inner life and she just doesn't talk about it, but outwardly it seems like she's....BLEH. Like there's nothing going on up there.

Entomology isn't the sort of field someone goes into because it's just the next logical step. People that are uninteresting go to grad school for engineering or law school or med school or something that is more straight path like that trains for a profession, rather than a broad study and understanding the most interesting organisms on the planet. As far as I've seen, there's no such thing as a boring entomologist. Maybe your experiences are different, but even my illustrious emeritus advisor who is quite old fashioned and has a narrow focus is far from boring. I'm pissed off because a boring entomologist doesn't factor nicely with what I know of reality. I estimate the department is wasting their time with this one, that S will quickly be out of the program. A waste of my time too.

This world needs fucking weirdness. The most interesting and interested people are also the really weird ones, the ones that have weirdness deep down. And entomology is full of these people. HT describes going to a national meeting like Entomological Society of America, as finally being in her element, the surprise of "Hey, everyone is weird here, everyone is into bugs just like me!" It's a confidence builder, all right, to know that you're part of a discipline that's producing more weirdness on this planet, that's cataloging weirdness, that's getting up close and personal with the weird of the really weird. It pisses me off that the same thing which is happening to the Meatrack in Tucson is happening to entomology, being flooded with boring, unweird people.

FUCK that.

for the Graduate Student Senate.

But they never get rowdy. 

I get a warm glowy feeling inside, and smile. 

I have discovered my rice cooker doubles as a steamer. Thus my vegetable experience is spiking to awesome fairly quickly. Yesterday I tried brussel sprouts for the first time and they were AWESOME. I didn't even add anything to them, just steamed for five minutes. Today I tried kale and it was equally good.

My list of tried or going to try (so far) :

Brussel Sprouts
Kale
Broccoli
Nappa
Bok Choy
Snow Peas
Asparagus

Any additions to that list? I'd love to hear people's tips for steaming, and preparation of vegetables before and after steaming.