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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. 40
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.
An Adventure Through the Computer
Saturday. 6.7.08 9:41 pm
I was going through some of my old files on my computer and I ran across some old drafts of letters that I wrote to some old high school friends during difficult times. I'd almost forgotten about several iterations of difficulties that we'd all had.

Craziness.

I also found this paragraph that I wrote during perhaps ?sophomore year in college? and then saved in a word file:

Hi Ranor.
:) I just wanted to tell how much I appreciate you being my friend. :)
I like seeing you on the street and skating up to hug you. I like it that you are always there if I feel sad. I like it when you're there when I feel happy to dance with joy with me. I like your messenger bag and your fuck-me shoes and your orchid and the way you like to shop for housewares even though it makes you feel unmanly. I like the way that cute boys make you all giggly inside and the way you look when you're drunk with those big brown sad eyes. I like your eyebrow piercing and how you know obscure bands. I like how you work hard at O-chem because it's important to you. I like the way you take pictures of people in order to capture important background eye-candy. You are the most fun person I have ever met. I like your clothes and the smell of your pillow. I like it how your face is smooth and expressive.

Love, Me

Don't remember if I actually ever sent that to Ranor.

Well here it is, a mere 4 years later.

And to end, an unrelated bit of a poem by Coleridge, which I also found in my adventures into old files:

In Nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced
With remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
(And so, poor wretch! Filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he,
First named these notes a melancholy strain.

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HAWAII
Thursday. 6.5.08 11:48 pm
Goin' to HAWAII
Goin' to HAWAII

Me and my friends, Sethifus and Zebo,

Goin' to HAWAII!



This geology thing is really working out for me.




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Yes, Sensei
Tuesday. 6.3.08 10:14 pm
Today we were looking at one of my images on the large projection wall at our audio-visual facility. It showed some seriously strange-looking patterns in the lava on Mars. I was in charge of discussion and in charge of the joystick which allowed us to fly around in the image. There was no preparation for the role, I just had to play it, engaging everyone, making sure they stayed interested, making sure each of their voices was heard, that the others properly understood what they were talking about, that their points and questions were addressed before someone changed the subject. At the end of the session my advisor asked me to wrap it up with a conclusion of a sort. I started talking but someone was having a side conversation with the audio-visual guy. My advisor told me that first I had to bring my group to order. "Let's all come back to order," I said, and my errant ducklings came back to the table sheepishly, as sheepish as ducklings have ever been. Then I wrapped up the session, went over the important points, and outlined what everyone ought to do in order to make progress forwards. It came pretty easily since I always have to listen in on the teleconferences that my advisor facilitates for other things.

It occurred to me that the whole exercise had been a teaching moment--- it was as much about helping me grow as a facilitator as it was about talking about Mars. It's sometimes crazy to realize all of the tiny things that my advisor does on a daily basis to mold us into the researchers of the future. Making us give presentations, making us lead groups, making us practice thinking up projects and delegating them to other people, even making us listen in on seemingly pointless telecon meetings.

It's just like what parents do, really. I played some mini golf today after work and I thought back to when I was first learning to play. Playing a round of putt-putt golf was always just as much if not more so about learning to play by the rules, learning good sportsmanship, and learning that a moment of calm patience hits the ball much better than one of impetuous frustrated rage---than it ever was about learning to play a good game of putt-putt.

But it was also about putt-putt, which is why I beat all my coworkers.
BWAHAHAAHAHAH!

I think many times your elders make you do tasks that seem arduous or meaningless, but if you've got a good teacher, there's usually a lesson in there somewhere, whether or not you realize it at the time.

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I Miss California
Monday. 6.2.08 10:40 am
:(

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Moving Day
Sunday. 6.1.08 7:50 pm
Moving Day. Had to help three of my friends move. I don't look forward to these days because it's like taking a trip back into my early days at the warehouse. Not because I didn't like my work at the warehouse but because every guy says, "Can I help you with that?"

I've noticed American guys aren't as bad. Is this because chivalry is dead? No, I think it is because equality has finally triumphed. Which would you prefer, ladies? Chivalry or equality? I'll take equality.

[Note: I won't get angry with a dude who asks me a question like this or does a chivalrous act, because I know that his intentions are good, it's simply a reflection of how he was raised, and he has no way to know that I am strong like She-Woman and in need of no help. If he sticks around long enough, I will prove it to him.]

But more angering and equally damning are all the girls who say, "Let's wait til the boys come back so they can lift the heavy stuff" Or, "We need boys for that one." etc.

Is this because girls are weak? Or lazy? Or both?
I know for at least one of my friends it's because she had a bunch of older brothers and she did nothing while they lifted all of her heavy objects as if she were a princess.

Truth be told, in the sport of moving boxes, there isn't a magical divide between girls and boys. There are strong people, and weak people. They can be of either gender. Many girls assume that they are weak when in truth they are lazy, and any physical weakness they may have is probably a side effect of low expectations.

So, just to sock it to the Man, I carried all of Crater Girl's things upstairs while "the boys" were driving around the U-Haul. I carried the mattress by myself, and I enlisted the "weaklings" to help me with the big stuff like the couch. "The boys" were like, "Wow, you got all this stuff up there??" and we shrugged, as if to ask why they would be surprised.

Now my legs are sore from all that lifting. But it was worth it! Bah humbug!

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Descent of the Phoenix
Saturday. 5.31.08 9:52 pm
As you probably already know, the Phoenix Lander has finally landed on Mars, after a journey of many months through the depths of space. I'm not as involved on this mission as I am on the Mercury Mission, but the Phoenix team was here a couple of months ago to get our opinion on what they should be looking for during the several weeks they spent in Antarctica last winter (Antarctic summer) as a trial run for the mission. One of their labs was also located across the hall from the lab of my friend's boyfriend at Tufts in Massachusetts.

We have one of the most spectacular telescopes ever built in orbit around Mars, that's the HiRISE camera, which sends back pictures of the surface at a resolution of about 35 cm per pixel. That's way better than the resolution we have for the Earth from orbit (at least publicly available...) and you can see way more because there isn't so much pesky vegetation in the way. Because the Phoenix Lander's descent was such a special event, they skewed the HiRISE camera to a crazy angle and took a high resolution shot of where the engineering team thought that the lander would be. Turns out the engineering team was spot-on, and they caught the lander in the act of parachuting through the Martian atmosphere.



How freakin' sweet is that. Plus, we've all been really worried because the whole point of the lander is to dig for ice, but if the lander happens to land in an area where the ice table is really deep, the mission is sol because it doesn't have any wheels. [The robotic arm can dig maybe ~30-40cm or so. Its goal is to find ice and then heat it up in an oven. The gases that come off of the sample can be analyzed in a miniature mass spectrometer, which can tell us if there are any organics present. It also has a bunch of other experiments that are designed to look for signs of life. I have my own theories about what else we could do with these ovens, but there are only four of them and they can each only be used once.]

But luckily for the Phoenix, it seems to have landed right on top of very thinly covered ice...!


They aren't totally sure yet that this is ice- but the jets on the spacecraft blew away a substantial quantity of dust, and it's possible that this has exposed an ice table lying just below the surface. My friend Joe's job is to study this landing area and the processes that are going on here. He's been to Antarctica several times to study similar landscapes. He's going to give us an update on Monday about the mission and whether or not this is really ice. I will, in turn, pass on the update to you.

For more information, check out the Phoenix website.

Exciting times in space science!

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Old Friends
Thursday. 5.29.08 9:04 pm

Having graduated, it's funny to realize that my so-called "new friends" have been slyly transforming into my "old friends" over the course of two years. I shall never forget all of the things we went through that brought us closer, whether it was that time it took us more than 24 hours to get from San Francisco to Providence, while my eye swelled shut, the time I offered to examine what my roommate thought might be an intestinal worm to allay her fears of infection, or the time that Thalweg smashed her face skiing and instead of accompanying her to the ski shop I went and bought a chocolate-covered candied waffle for myself, and the ski patrol told me I was a bad friend.

Then there was the time that I scared the Welshman half to death by magically entering the building when all of the doors were supposed to be locked. Or that one time we stayed up for almost a week straight on chocolate-covered expresso beans, just to get a trip to San Francisco. (The same trip where it took us more than 24 hours to get back, ironically)

Yes, there were dark times. There were bright times. There was the time we got invited to a rave by a bunch of people on drugs that we met in the woods and then they helped us with our rock climbing and made us write on them. There were muskrats. And wasps. Cat asthma. Visiting Lil after she got appendicitis. Building a gigantic zen garden for one of our professors in a corrugated metal tub. Finding a huge metal poster of a man's ass behind one of the filing cabinets in Thalweg's office. Meeting Gunther, the Pleasureman. There was that one time when I was really sick last year and my roommate let me drag my mattress into his air conditioned room and crash there. And the one time I ran all the way to my house to get my car because the zebo had a wicked migraine and she needed to be driven home. They were there to make me feel triumphant after my first talk at a conference.

Some of them are gone already. Many of them will be leaving next year.

I'll miss them.

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Time to get personals
Wednesday. 5.28.08 7:16 pm
I decided that I needed to take a more active approach to my dating life. So I joined Chemistry.com.

Here is my profile:

Hmmm, yes

Hmm, yes... I enjoy summering in the Hamptons, my stable full of hundreds of Arabian stallions, fine cheeses, and motoring along the information superhighway any Sunday afternoon.
I appreciate a good monocle and a man who says, "Oh, ho!" when he laughs, and then, "oh, my sides." Some Chester A. Arthur sideburns and a fancy cumberbund wouldn't hurt either.

I have traditional Victorian values and a weakness for collecting pencil sharpeners.
I hope to find the man of my dreams so that we can take accordion lessons together. Would that you were he!


So far I have three people interested after two days. But they said that I'd get 8 times as many if I added a picture. I was thinking maybe this one would do:

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