“reminiscing”

Now that I think of it, I’d seen similar contraptions before but this one is particularly elegant and interesting: you throw it in the air and it changes color! Pure witchcraft. And the forms—the forms!—are beautiful in that uniquely arresting way that only mathematics can give. It’s our generation’s geodesic dome^WP.

I remember one high school philosophy class where our fantastic teacher (James Kurtz) had nothing prepared but a smooth, solid piece of metal he had found inside his car engine. The assignment for the one-hour class was to write an essay on what we could infer from the alien civilization that created the artifact if we suddenly found it on its own on a faraway planet, with no cues whatsoever of its purpose. It was jolly good fun with a pretty nondescript ferrous blob, so I wonder what I’d have said had he brought this color-changing whatchamacallit.

To begin with, I guess it’s fair to assume such civilization had to know its math pat. Perhaps several alien PhDs went into the theory of this ball and its theoretical inspiration even carries the name of some great alien topologist^WP, à la Poincaré sphere^WP. I’d be willing to bet that they have computers, there’s no way they could have built this without CAD^WP. And the material itself, plastic, and the way it’s shaped, is nothing trivial—it shows some deep knowledge of chemistry, materials science^WP, and manufacturing techniques.

And had I known that the whole thing was available for the alien equivalent of one dollar in the alien equivalent of a flea-market, and that it had no application than to be amusing, well, I’d have gasped!

At any rate, don’t (don’t!) let my babbling discourage you, go buy one!

There’s something deep about Riya, the new image search engine, that bugs me. It reminds me a lot of a group in my university that was developing a digital whiteboard back in 2002. It was a fascinating technology, and, these being the days of Minority Report^{WP, IMDB}, I was infatuated with the possibilities. The thing was expensive and bulky, but allowed for some really sweet, unprecedented interaction with the computer not that far from those of said movie.

It’s early morning and it rains droplets and brisk light outside—I’m happy.

...solia decirnos mi papa cada vez que nos enojabamos por que mi mama nos mandaba a hacer algo.

Ha mucho de eso, pero todavia lo recuerdo cada vez que me mandan a hacer algo que me molesta. It never fails to cheer me up.

Out of college but still smack in the very-naive-but-pretentious-worldviews phase.

“No puedes corres, quieres vuelas.”—decia la abuela de Toño, mi muy apreciado maestro de frances.

Tio Tani [por telefono]: Oye char, y tienen luz?
Yo: Ehh… si tio. Claro. Por que? Se le fue la luz? ... Usted tiene en su casa?
Tio Tani: Poca.
Yo: ?

Mi tio tiene esquizofrenia y le cuesta mucho trabajo hilvanar sus ideas con coherencia. Ocasionalmente dice cosas tan incongruentes que son chistosisimas.

This past 3day weekend I went to Vallarta with my family. Our main purpose was to see my paternal grandmother, who is in Parkinson’s terminal stages.