Cool or really Uncool?
Would you guys order one of these?
Just curious; the jury is out.
Actually, the girl is kind of a babe and the guy is just, well, kind of gay.
Now if it had my URL on it . . .
~m
It’s time for Tim Purpura to make the tough choice and fire Phil Garner. If he doesn’t want to do that, then Drayton McLane needs to fire Purpura and bring in someone who’s willing to do more than just sit with the status quo.
I’m a Phil Garner fan. I grew up watching him play, and he’s done a pretty good job for the Astros since he became skipper. But this year, it is becoming ever more apparent with each passing game than Garner truly has no idea what he’s doing.
Saturday’s loss to Arizona, the Astros’ 8th loss in a row, was proof positive that Garner needs to be relieved of his duties. He pinch-hit for Chris Sampson in the 6th with nobody on base and two outs, which was completely ludicrous given that Sampson had pitched a decent game thus far. He also took Hunter Pence out of the game in the eighth, moving Lance Berkman to center and putting Orlando Palmerio in right field. I’m not sure what made Garner take the best hitter on the team out of the game when they were only one run down, but it’s inexcusable and idiotic.
My sister said they ought to just make Jeff Bagwell the manager for the rest of the year, and that’s not a bad idea. Bring Bags in, see how he does, and maybe bring up Brooks Conrad and a few of the younger guys and get them some playing time. I’m 99% sure that Brooks Conrad would do as well or better than Adam Everett has at the plate, and while I know that Everett is the best defensive shortstop in the entire world, I still think it’s time to freshen things up.
They need to start with getting rid of Garner. It’s past due.
I love to paint and collage. It is a free style that opened locked doors in my soul. Those will probably be the biggest part of my medium of choice. I am committed to adding another layer though. Learning to draw. I am especially interested in learning to draw people.
I checked out Usborne’s Drawing Faces from the library a few weeks ago. (BTW, it’s a juvenile book but I am convinced that if you really want to learn something, start with a juvenile book) Tonight, while we watched Second Hand Lions, I started working on a pencil drawing of a face. It was supposed to look like the one in the book and by that measure, I didn’t do so well. But, I am very pleased with my first attempt.
~~Grace and Peace~~
The dominant mood at the UC Berkeley Protest this morning was fear. The students are afraid. The staff is afraid. The faculty are afraid. And, oddly enough, the administration is afraid. Of course, the protesters tried not to let on that they were afraid. There was feigned outrage and anger. But in their eyes, you could see fear.
Let me start by telling you why the administration is afraid. The administration, like the faculty, know that a university thrives when it is filled with smart people. They also know that smart people aren’t necessarily rich. A historical digression: for many hundred years in Europe, the smartest (most learned) people in the world owned almost no property whatsoever. Throughout the Dark Ages, books did not reside in the houses of kings or princes, but in the hands of the clergy. Books were found in the domiciles of monks, who often owned little more than the robes on their back. My main point here: smart people aren’t always wealthy, and wealthy people aren’t always smart.
In the last century, the University of California has succeeded due to (at least in part) the intellectual (and physical) labor done by students who weren’t ? hmm, how shall I put this ? financially well-endowed. Now, because of (1) the limping economy and (2) mismanagement of funds by state government and the UC Regents, it looks like the University of California is going to have to lay off staff and faculty (who have already taken pay cuts), and raise the tuition fees of students.
Surely, this scares shit out of the faculty, staff and students. But the administration knows that it will be losing its life-blood: lots of hard-working and intelligent people. Worse, the poor smart students may soon be replaced by dumb rich ones. The kids who are settling for the University of California because they were rejected from\xA0Yale and\xA0Brown. And that’s gonna suck for the University California.
This is just one of the many reasons for people’s fear. The real cause of fear this morning seemed to be that the people who decide how the University’s money is spent don’t seem to be willing to acquiesce to the demands of the students, faculty and staff, and the protest movement is losing steam. Rather than escalating the movement, a good deal of the base-level (grass roots) support seem to be retreating. Many people are just losing hope, becoming cynical. The leaders of this protest movement are desperately trying convince these disenchanted, jaded followers that change is possible; that the regents will back down if enough pressure is applied. Whether they will actually succeed is anybody’s
guess.
Update: November 17th! Sounds like classes will resume at Westmont College Monday December 1st…
Update on Tea Fire as of 10:30 Nov. 16th!
By and large, last night was quiet and today, the fourth day of the Tea Fire, should see further recovery efforts by firefighters. So far, 1,940 acres have burned and 210 homes have been lost ? 130 in the City of Santa Barbara and 80 in the County of Santa Barbara. Damage assessment is continuing
Looks like my nephew Caleb’s room was spared fire damage. Still need to assess the smoke damage.
Here’s a link to photos from Westmont from the fire. Just click here.
Update: Saturday 9/15\xA0~ \xA0I just received this email from my SIL whose 2 sons attend Westmont. They are preparing for taking in some of the students displaced because of the fires at Westmont. I’m sure there are more people who live in the Southern California area that will have extra students staying at their homes this weekend.
Hi,\xA0
Everyone is fine, or as fine as can be.\xA0 I’m expecting several carloads of kids to start arriving shortly.\xA0 Everyone has been moved off campus until next Wednesday as\xA0 they assess damages and decide where to move people around.\xA0 There have been broken gas lines etc. so there is no way to keep kids there and to feed them.\xA0 Caleb wanted to stay closer to campus yesterday in case he could get up to his dorm.\xA0 His section is one of the ones that burned, but he’s on the bottom floor and there is a chance some of his stuff survived.\xA0 We’ll see.\xA0 They hope to resume classes late next week, some of that will depend on facuilty…since so many lost homes.\xA0 The President is making an announcement Monday night…I guess then we will learn how long we will have houseguests for:)
We are praising God that no one was hurt.\xA0 With the speed it whipped through those neighborhoods it’s amazing everyone got to safety.\xA0 Caleb said they were expecting an earthquake drill that day so people didn’t automatically respond to the fire alarms.\xA0 He heard people calling that it was a fire, so he walked out of his room…saw the flames on the hill…went in his room to get his laptop…and by the time he got out there were already flames at the edge of campus.\xA0 He’s at the farthest end from the gym and said people were hurrying by then and when they got to the gym they already had embers landing on them and the trees around them.\xA0 Once everyone was accounted for they sealed up the gym and let the fire run through…they could watch it through the glass doors at the front of the gym.\xA0 After about 5 hours or so, the worst had passed and they let people out to get provisions from the DC of water and muffins etc.\xA0 By about 1:00 they started letting people with cars at the gym leave campus so Levi left with his girlfriend who had been there for a PE class, but Caleb opted to stay with his suitemates.\xA0 Yesterday they were figuring out who was from out of state and didn’t have anywhere to go and were dividing them up…
It was also College Preview Days, so there were extra high school students on campus…I’m sure that was pretty scary for them.\xA0 Luckily many of the homes that burned are second homes and people weren’t there.\xA0 There just aren’t very many roads out of the mountain so it’s hard to move quickly…that’s why Westmont built the firesafe gym, without a fair amount of lead time they would never have gotten all the cars off the mountain.\xA0 The worst losses were the faculty homes, some of them friends of ours.\xA0 So sad.\xA0 Several of the other buildings that burned were slated for demolition anyway, as the school is int he midst of a building program.\xA0 Caleb said most of the trees and gardens survived, and it didn’t look as bad as the news made it sound.\xA0 (Isn’t that always the way)\xA0
Thanks for all of your prayers.\xA0
Scroll down for updates…
Local
First of all, I would like to congratulate all the cast of the (now making 25 million and running) new Horror film from Star Cinema “T2” directed by Chito Ro\xF1o.
But while I was watching the film yesterday, I noticed one girl who really captured my attention even if she played the antagonist of the film in the form of an “enkanto” (a mystical being from another world) most likely known as the mysterious “White Lady” in the Philippines. And her name is Carmen Soo.
Well the film actually had the best actress in Philippine showbiz for me, Maricel Soriano, and just about the prettiest and talented nine year old in show business today, Mica de la Cruz, but I just have to say Carmen Soo made the horror film a a sight of beauty for me.
By the way, Carmen Soo is a British-Chinese fashion model and actress born in Malaysia. And I don’t know if you noticed her, but she actually had a minor acting role in the movie\xA0 ‘Gorgeous‘ alongside\xA0 Jackie Chan & Shu Qi, and she later on played the leading actress in Aaron Kwok’s musical special.
No wonder why Malaysia once labeled her as their “Sexiest Secret”. Cause she is by looks, and everything about her sexy.
3 Critical:
- Real Name – is Carmen Soo Wai Mun. Now doesn’t that sound more\xA0 Asian to you?
- Whats T2? – just in case some of you are still wondering, T2 means Tenement No. 2. A semi abandoned building made into homes for the homeless.
- Soo Beautiful – isn’t she?
The image at the upper left of this webpage was generated using a very simple program written in MSWLogo.
The fractals that are easily drawn by Logo are L-systems or “Lindenmayer System” fractals. (http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/gabro/lsys/lsys.html) An L-system is a type of grammar that specifies rules which can be iterated to form self-representive images. Given one rule, an entire fractal can be drawn. Here are some examples below:
Let’s start with the c-curve. The basic unit of these fractals is the straight line. The first iteration of the c-curve is a second line perpendicular to the first:
The method of drawing this fractal is to first draw a line, make a 90 degree angle, then draw another line. Actually this is incorrect…somewhat. It is difficult to see in this picture. Perhaps it would be clearer this way:
As you can see, each iteration of the fractal replaces all the lines with a 90 degree L-shape.
First a line is drawn. Then two, then four.
The first iteration is the line.
second iteration: make the 90 degree L-shape.
third iteration: make two of the 90 degree L shapes.
You may be wondering how this can create the iterations above. Well, we write the entire bit of code to produce the c-curve just by knowing the first and second iterations, and then we use recursion.
ok, so we know to draw a line and we know then we have to draw two lines, then four…
well, what we can start to see is that each time a line should be drawn, it can be replaced with the two lines at a 90 degree angle…
The pseudocode for the first iteration looks like this:
- first iteration:
- draw a straight line
- second iteration:
- draw straight line
- turn right 90 degrees
- draw straight line
- turn left 90 degrees
- third iteration:
- draw straight line
- turn right 90 degrees
- draw straight line
- turn left 90 degrees
- turn right 90 degrees
- draw straight line
- turn right 90 degrees
- draw straight line
Now, I said we only needed to know the first and second iterations. Actually the second is the most important. It is the basic structure of the fractal. Let’s look at the pseudocode for it:
draw straight line
turn right
draw straight line
turn left
We know each of those “draw straight line” could actually be this shape too, so what if instead of drawing a straight line, we just drew another L-shape? The way to do this is to run this fractal routine recusively. Here’s what I’m talking about:
call c_curve
turn right
call c_curve
turn left
The only issue is that we don’t actually draw a straight line with this code. So we add a functional argument, :iterations.
call c_curve :iterations-1
turn right
call c_curve :iterations-1
turn left
Now we have to add some condition that when iterations finally gets to 1, we draw a line:
if :iterations = 1 draw straight line
else
call c_curve :iterations-1
turn right
call c_curve :iterations-1
turn left
In the language of Logo, the code looks like this:
to c_curve :length :iterations
ifelse :iterations=1 [forward :length] [
c_curve :length :iterations-1
right 90
c_curve :length :iterations-1
left 90
]
end
at length=3 and iterations=13 we can draw this picture:
A variation on this fractal is the dragon curve. The dragon curve appears very complex, however it is based on a simple c-curve. Let’s look at the iterations:
Iterations one and two are identical to the c-curve, however we see that the L-shapes alternate inside and outside the lines. Instead of replacing each line with the L-shape, each line is replaced with alternating L-shapes. To achieve this, we must introduce another variable. Here, I used the variable :angle (which I always intially set to 90 when calling) to provide the alternation:
to dragon :length :iterations :angle
ifelse :iterations=1 [forward :length] [
dragon :length :iterations-1 90
right :angle
dragon :length :iterations-1 -90
]
end
The above picture was generated with only fourteen iterations, with a length of 3 units.
This general method of coding fractals in Logo can be applied to many more.
The Koch fractal in Logo looks like:
The code to generate this is:
to koch :lenght :iterations
ifelse :iterations=1 [forward :length] [
koch :length :iterations-1
left 60
koch :length :iterations-1
right 120
koch :length :iterations-1
left 60
koch :length :iterations-1
[
end
This image was generated with length of two and iterations = 5. Now, this is interesting, but what if we start with a closed shape instead of a line? We can generate the famous Koch snowflake with these iterations:
The basic first shape is the triangle, which is drawn with a separate function, however for each of the sides, the Koch Snowflake routine calls koch. The resulting code in Logo is this:
to koch_snowflake :length :iterations
left 120
koch :length :iterations
right 120
koch :length :iterations
right 120
koch :lenght :iterations
end
This image was generated with length 2 and iterations = 5.
Here is a quirky little fractal that I am playing around with now. It is somewhat a variation on the Koch curve in that it's structure is like this:
I was experimenting with waveforms at different iterations, and this is the first interesting one I came across. The waveform is digital, and exhibits a spike in the sample. For this reason, I entitled it "digital blip."
The Logo code is:
to digital_blip :length :iterations
ifelse :iterations=1 [forward :length] [
digital_blip :length :iterations-1
left 90
digital_blip :length :iterations-1
digital_blip :length :iterations-1
right 90
digital_blip :length :iterations-1
right 90
digital_blip :lenght :iterations-1
digital_blip :length :iterations-1
left 90
digital_blip :length :iterations-1
]
end
The image was created with length of one and only six iterations. It is interesting to note all the circular shapes that were formed from its very square basis. The overall shape almost appears to be a cross, and is quite gothic in appearance. Perhaps this fractal is in need of a better name.
Here is another view of it, repeated four times in the shape of a square:
One more thing: I came across an interesting page about the Sierpinski Triangle and randomness. The site is: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/complexity/sierpinski.html
They said they would help me change and that I would not be a freak anymore.
Wires, belts, needles, whispers, hands, people touching me, holding me, waving pictures before my eyes, photos of boys, handsome boys… oh, yes, I like boys, I have always loved boys… I said – I am just an ordinary gay next door, there’s no woman under my skin, but they kept saying I would be happy, asking rhetorically who wants to be deviant anyway.
AAAAAH TREMBLING AND SHAKING AND CONVULSING AND OH PAIN EXCRUCIATING PAIN AND THEN IT GOT WHITE AND ALL I COULD HEAR WAS MUSIC BYE BYE LOVE, BYE BYE HAPPINESS, HELLO LONELINESS, I THINK I’M GONNA CRY and I cried and cried until my tears quit on me, or – was it Valium that made me not care?
Something was not working as it should, they told me that my deviance was a serious one and here I was lying surrounded by belts, even more needles, scalpels, whispers, hands, people touching me, holding me, no pictures before my eyes this time, but then I got sleepy and did not care much even before they put me on the table; a needle went into my sore veins and seconds later I was getting even calmer. They would cure me for sure and I would be pretty-as-a-girl when I wake up, one step further on my way to the penis-less and breast-full body.
The anesthetic was working, I was fading; all that I could register was the white light following me through what I back then did not know was my last crawl through the corridors of consciences and then the music started again BYE BYE LOVE, BYE BYE SWEET CARESS, HELLO EMPTINESS, I FEEL LIKE I COULD DIE, I FEEL I’M GONNA DIE, I FEEL and then I did not feel anything, anymore, ever again.
…………………………….
The piece I wrote was inspired by the Aversion Project.
A study called ‘The Aversion Project’ found that gay conscripts in the South African Defense Forces (SADF) during the apartheid era, during 1970s and 80s, had been forced to submit to ‘curing’ their homosexuality, both by electroshock therapies and by botched sex changes.
Sex-change operations, medical torture and chemical castration were perpetrated on national servicemen in a bizarre program to cure ‘deviants’ during the apartheid era.
To this day dozens of victims of the program are crippled and disfigured, stranded halfway between male and female by incomplete sex-change operations performed by the South African Defence Force (SADF).
Many more are sterile after being chemically castrated. A number of the victims have committed suicide. Surgeons who served under the SADF confirmed that a number of patients died on the operating table while having their sex changed; the actual causes of their death were never made public.
The quote above is from\xA0Newsmakings.com (’send your son to us and we’ll make a man of him; if that fails, we have Plan B‘).\xA0More can be read here and here.
The girls are taken to a teach about Hawaiian hula and how it can be integrated with hip-hop. The girls learn several moves and are assigned to use them to tell a story. During rehearsal, Erin uses her cheerleading experience to help the girls get their routine down. While most of the girls perform well, Nicole messes up her entire routine. Laura ends up winning a 5-day trip back to Hawaii after the competition is over, which she shares with Jennifer, much to Erin’s frustration.
At the photo shoot, the girls are told that two of them will be eliminated at the next panel, shocking them. While Erin and Nicole perform rather well, Laura and Jennifer stumble. At panel, Laura and Nicole are praised for their pictures but Erin and Jennifer are castigated for their poor film. In the end, Laura, Jennifer and Erin land in the bottom three, Laura for not looking like a model in person and the other two for their dwindling performances.
Ultimately, an overjoyed Laura joins Nicole as a finalist, while Jennifer and Erin are sent home, both of them being upset to have come so close to the win, yet so far.
* First Call-Out: Nicole Fox
* Bottom Three: Erin Wagner, Jennifer An & Laura Kirkpatrick
* Eliminated: Erin Wagner & Jennifer An
* Featured Photographer: Steve Shaw
* Special Guests: Ann Shoket, Anna Rita Sloss
* Top Model in Action: Katarzyna Dolinska (Cycle 10)
SOURCE : WIKIPEDIA.COM
NICOLE, LAURA, ERIN, JENNIFER.
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