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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Relationships Through a Vent
Monday. 11.20.06 8:36 am

I was thinking- what if my whole life passed within these four walls? What if as soon as I'd moved here, I'd been imprisoned in this room and forgotten? What if all I ever knew of the outside world was what I could hear of my housemates through that large, elaborately-styled cast iron vent?
That would be crazy. I'd hear everything- the fighting, the harsh words, the forgiveness, the murmur of sweet nothings that pass between them, the giggling, everything. "Let's go out!" she'd say. "I don't want to," he'd respond. I wouldn't understand... how could you want to stay in? I, trapped in one place forever, would be unable to grasp such an emotion.

I wouldn't even know what they looked like. Would it be better if I didn't know what they looked like? I could pretend that they looked however I pleased.
But even in my imagination they wouldn't look perfect or beautiful. Their appearances in my mind would be colored by the way they act toward one another. His face would show the mark of the ugly words he uses when he's angry. Her face would show the desperate love of someone who needs more attention than she's getting. His would should the lines of frustration of someone dealing with someone who has absolutely a bottomless need for attention.

Would I take the same pleasure that I do now in the cold silence of their absence? Ah, the cold silence. I missed it while I was in California. I mean, California does have ominous, foggy silences, but they are always full of something. Pregnant silences. The cold silence of winter is empty. I like it. I missed it. There's nothing quite as silent as that. My advisor says that that's what working in Antartica is like.

Would I find that silence lonely? Would I even know what lonely was like anymore, lacking any immediate experience for comparison?

But how would my world be changed when they let me out, and I saw them for the first time? I wonder, if I then tried to have a relationship, how it would be shaped by what I'd had to endure for so many years, hearing an entire relationship unfold through a vent.

Maybe through time different people would move into that room and I'd get more than one data point on which to base my analyses.

It's not the first time people have pondered such a question, of course- I should imagine that deciding the nature of relationships through a vent would be alike in difficulty to trying to determine the nature of the world by watching it go by in shadows on the wall of a cave.

Comment! (4) | Recommend! (4)

Oh, those crazy roommates
Sunday. 11.19.06 1:58 pm
Well my roommates are having sex again. I think that's probably the third time since whenever I woke up, around quarter to ten. And in between? GIGGLINg. I mean, don't know much about it, but it would seem like that much sex would tire you out after a while. I mean, seriously, like in the morning, in the middle of the night, right after lunch- when do you do work? When do you write poetry? When do you surf facebook for hours, determining how many groups exist with the phrase "Denver Broncos" in their titles and whether they are for or against?

What kind of losers would give up these priceless opportunities for hours and hours of extremely loud carnal pleasure with someone you've sort of known for a few months and who conveniently lives right downstairs?


Not me. I'll be over here playing my music louder and louder and trying to read a book about tectonic processes on Mercury.

Man, I used to think that this kind of irritant only happened in those extreme cases in the movies where people live in crappy apartments with very thin walls. This is the second time I've lived in a place where this has been a problem and neither place has been crappy.

I've always liked this shirt on that bustedtees website that says, "Sex: Do it for the Kids"

heh heh.

Here's my version:

Abstinence: Do it for the Neighbors.

Comment! (7) | Recommend!

The Nature of Goodness
Thursday. 11.16.06 4:00 am
Ok, so a Tale of Two Cities. Don't read this if you don't want to hear me refer to what happens in the end.


Sydney Carton. In my opinion one of the most sympathetic and tragically noble characters in literature. A waste of life. A drunkard. Someone who could have been attractive but ruined it by weakness in character. I know plenty of people like this. So I was reading about him on Wikipedia, and I thought the person who was synopsizing him put the question of who he really was interestingly. The person basically said that Carton's sacrifice at the end could be viewed in two different ways: Either he did it nobly and selflessly, giving his life because he cares so much for Lucie Manette and he wants her to have her husband back, something something, whatever. I'll copy and paste the actual entry:

"The most common interpretation of Sydney Carton is one in which he is the selfless benefactor of others. Having grown weary of his life of self-indulgence, he decides to sacrifice it in order to save the life of Charles Darnay, who had shown himself more worthy of living it than Carton had his own. However, a more self-centered interpretation of Carton also exists. In this interpretation, Carton regrets his being regarded as a ne'er-do-well for having wasted his life, and chooses to give it up, hoping that his past will be forgotten and that he will be remembered for his sacrifice. This interpretation suggests that Carton is more concerned with his reputation than with the well-being of Darnay and his family."

Now this made me wonder. Would the fact that Carton gave his life for Darnay just so that people would remember him as a good person instead of a huge failure at life make his act selfish?
I think a far more selfish act would have been to let Darnay die and then attempt to take his place in Lucie's heart after he was gone, don't you? If your whole life was spent doing good for others, but the only reason you did it is because you wanted to die with everyone thinking that you were good, would that mean that you yourself were never actually "good", and your whole life was essentially a farce? If people discovered that your driving force for good wasn't that you were good but that you wanted to be seen as being good, would they decide that you were in fact a selfish person?

Let's turn that on its head. What if you did all kinds of bad things, but you did them for selfless reasons? Does that make you a good person? I can't answer with a resounding yes on that one.

Perhaps the most noble of actions are those in which you make a sacrifice for what is right without anyone ever knowing that you did it. Perhaps everyone thinks ill of you, but if they only knew the truth, they would know that you are noble and good. However, by the very nature of the truth it would be ignoble to reveal it. Yet you steadfastly stay the course because you are essentially good and that trumps your desire for people to see you as a good person.

So that begs the question- would Carton have sacrificed himself for the sake of Darnay if Lucie would have never known about his sacrifice? What if he managed to wrangle Darnay's head from the guillotine and replace it with his own but Darnay never knew how or why it came about? Would he still have done it?


I think he would have.


Comment! (5) | Recommend! (2)

Waaay off the Richter
Monday. 11.13.06 10:29 pm
I'm learning about how we figure things out about the surface of Venus, considering that the whole damn planet is covered in clouds and they absorb, scatter and reflect every photon of light that tries to come through without transmitting a bit. (well, as little as possible.) This has of course created a runaway greenhouse effect on the planet, which has finally resulted in a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and a surface pressure more than 90 times the surface pressure here on Earth. There is lightning on Venus, which is pretty cool, and some rain... but the rain is made of sulfuric acid. Talk about acid rain. The landers that the Soviets put down on the surface lasted only hours before the intense atmosphere fried them completely. So how can we learn about the surface then, if it is impossible to see? Pure. Ingenuity. Of Smart People. Who are not Me.

First of all we use radar. Radar is a type of light which has a really long wavelength, kind of like radio waves. So while a photon of light with a high energy and a short wavelength zig-zags really fast and runs into all kinds of particles on its way to the surface (thus getting scattered away uselessly) radar takes a much more direct path through all the particles and therefore a lot more of the radar beam gets through. If you can bounce radar off the surface and recollect it you can figure out all of the topography on the surface, and to some extent, how rough the surface is (a smooth surface returns a strong signal because it's like a mirror, a rough surface doesn't return as much signal because it's like a broken mirror in that it returns light in every direction, not just the one where the light came from). We use other things, like the reflective and electric properties of minerals, to learn all kinds of things using just radar.

BUT GET THIS: We want to know something about the seismic activities going on in the crust of Venus (the "venusquakes"). But if we put a seismometer on the surface, it's going to be crushed and fried in hours. What to do? These random guys figured out that if you have an atmosphere that is as thick as Venus', the seismic shaking from a quake, that is, the wave of energy passing through the crust, actually continues propagating through the air above the crust after it hits that interface in a measurable way (because the atmosphere is so thick!!). The crustal wave can actually transfer some of its energy to the air, kind of like shaking out a rug underwater and imparting the waves of the rug to the water around it. So by looking for these waves, we can tell what is going on beneath the surface of Venus without even having to look through its atmosphere.

These people are so crafty!

btw- have you ever looked into the sky and seen a flat sheet of cloud that looks like a bunch of parallel bands? These clouds are located at a place in the sky where two air masses of different densities are moving past each other. The interaction of the two densities along a plane causes waves to form. These are the same kind of waves that happen between sea and sky, only not as extreme because the densities of the air are not as different from each other as both are from the density of water. You can also get waves like these from different densities of water, so they are essentially submarine waves. During WWII, submarines wanted to get into the Mediterranean, but they couldn't turn on their engines or they would be detected by sonar. So they devised a plan where they would go down to the depth where two different densities of water causes submarine waves to go through the Straight of Gibraltar. So essentially they surfed into the Mediterranean, on waves 100s of feet below the surface!!

That's why waves are soooo coool.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

Spirit Island
Monday. 11.13.06 6:52 pm
Jasper continued paddling, and the river opened suddenly into a large lake, crowned by mountains, the images of whom shimmered slightly ahead of the prow of the boat. In the center of the lake there was an island, inhabited by a dark copse of tall evergreens which stood out sharply against the dazzling background of the early mountain fall.
Spirit Island. He repeated the name to Dakar, who bowed very deeply to the old trees, his wings deflected and their tips dragging gently in the water.
"Why do you bow?" Jasper asked.
"I show respect to the spirits of your ancestors," Dakar replied uncertainly.
"Oh, my ancestors aren't here," Jasper explained, "Nobody in my family has ever been here but me. I just come here to think sometimes. It's restful for my mind and I usually think of whatever I need."
"But who delivers the answers you seek? What spirits live here? Not your ancestors?"
Jasper shook his head. "I think of the answers on my own. Sometimes your mind just needs a quiet place. They just call it Spirit Island because it sounds nice. I think maybe the name was passed down from the ancient people who lived here before my race came."
He paused, looking up at the trees as they whispered together in the dying light.

"If there are spirits here," he said slowly, "Then they must be very old indeed."

Comment! (3) | Recommend!

yay
Saturday. 11.11.06 5:50 am
So my secret crush liked my shirt today, it was my ninja turtles shirt. That was awesome because I wore it today specifically because I knew I'd be seeing him and in hopes that he would like it. Score one for me!

Comment! (3) | Recommend!

We like the moon
Tuesday. 11.7.06 11:13 pm
You know that picture of a moon that is in the background? I took it myself, through a large telescope I was using.

Comment! (5) | Recommend!

Angry
Wednesday. 11.1.06 11:18 pm
I saw The Departed. A good movie. I really liked Leonardo DiCaprio's character.

Went with my two friends, who laughed long and hard at all of the totally sexist jokes in the movie, which brought upon a very dark mood and made me think about the feminist movement, and how even though I wouldn't characterize myself as a feminist, I benefit every day from the things they collectively accomplished for womankind. If they hadn't accomplished all of that, I wouldn't be able to follow my current career path in the sciences. I probably wouldn't even be in graduate school. I would be in jail, because I would have kicked somebody's ass in a serious way by now, because if it's one thing I can't stand, it's sexist bullshit.

But really, that movie just makes you want to swear and beat people up.

I offered in a very insincere way to give my friend a ride home and he declined, and I was in too dark a mood to be as glad as I should have been.

On a slightly related tangent, you can't really like a guy who likes Boondock Saints, because that is a shitty movie. Girls who say they like it are lying so that guys will think they are "one of the crowd". I'm serious. Come on. Give me a break. There isn't a single character in that movie that you can like. And by like, I mean respect. And it is violent to the point where you aren't horrified or disgusted, you're just bored, like, "come on, would you at least try to kill the guy in a more interesting way, like in one of the coolest movies of all time, The Rock?" Just like Kill Bill, man, was that movie so boring. It's like watching someone else play a video game and just about as realistic.

This movie was good, but that's because Leonardo Dicaprio was in it and his acting was awesome. And his character was someone I could respect. I can feel this turning into another rant on the Princess Diaries II, which was the worst movie ever, possibly worse than Boondock Saints and Kill Bill but it's really close.

I'd better get to bed, I'll feel a lot exactly the same after a good night's rest.

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