I just remembered about Kiva. Check it out. Definitely makes a good holiday gift:

Yesterday, I took Lena to Banya 5, a Russian style bath house/day spa. It was amazing. They have 5 areas in the downstairs pools to circulate. First, the hot pool, then the Turkish steam room (very steamy), next a Parilka (dry sauna), a cold plunge, and lastly a warm salt water pool. You make that circuit a few times and by the end (as long as you drank a lot of water  in between), you feel like you were just born–without the crying and shock of a new world order.

After spending most of the day at Banya 5, we cooked dinner and watched Munich, a fascinating film that was sort of the opposite of Banya 5. It brought back the realization of what kind of world we live in. But I couldn’t help thinking how the world would be different if everyone spent a couple days a week soaking in a banya.

It’s almost 4am and I may be totally out of my mind–but this popped into my head about an hour ago.

let } define the output or the “yield” of a mathematical operation.
Here are the two points I am going to make:

1) x divided by zero yields zero: x/0 } 0

2) x divided by zero equals x: x/0=x (with = defined as the balance point)
Imagine you have a cake cut into 6 slices.

If I divide your cake by 2, taking 3 of those 6 pieces, you keep the other 3. When I divide your cake’s 6 pieces by 2, 3 pieces don’t magically disappear from the universe. Therefore:
6/2 != 3; (that is 6/2 does not equal 3)

6/2 = 3+3;
6/2 } 3; // (6/2 yields 3)

I divide your 6 parts by 6, taking 1 part of 6 (1/6), 5 other people each take 1 piece or 1/6.
I divide your 6 parts by 3, taking 2 parts of 6 (2/6), 3 other people each take 2 pieces or 2/6.
I divide your 6 parts by 2, taking 3 parts of 6 (3/6), 2 other people each take 3 pieces or 3/6.
I divide your 6 parts by 1 (all for myself), taking 6 parts of 6 (6/6 or 100%). You keep 0/6.
I divide your 6 parts by 0 (nobody wants any), taking 0 parts of 6 from your cake (0/6 or 0%), you keep 6/6.

Therefore:

6/0 = 6;

6/0 } 0;
I won’t be hurt if you find a good argument for why this is totally absurd. I’m heading back to bed. Hopefully writing it down will be enough to let me sleep.

OK, I just signed up for Second Life and It’s pretty cool:

I was hesitant at first because it’s just another MMORPG. But it’s not. What makes it different (besides it’s real world economy and complete customization)?

Well, for starters, there’s the LSL (Linden Scripting Language). You can create objects in world and then write scripts to make them do things. You can make anything–then you can sell it.

Crazy? Yes. Profitable? If you code or design. I’m in. I’m hooked. Damn… check it out. Look me up:

My second life identity: Atom Ewry

I’ve been oversleeping lately anyway ;)

There was this old church that had the bottom floor turned into a community center. There were dozens of floors above us that were still the original building. I was talking to this group of adolescent guys I didn’t know. They said they were graffiti artists. I saw one of them sparing with another and they said that was their thing. They all liked to spar but they all had their own styles. I said I’d like to try out my hand against one of them. They weren’t hitting each other hard–it was just playful whacking.

In the main room, a couple of them stood up and said they would challenge anyone with their Gung-Fu style. A slightly larger group stood up and posed in a horse stance with their fingers pointed out, “We will beat you with our Pointing Style.”

Another larger group leaped off the ground and hovered in unison, all in lotus position with nothing but their index fingers holding them off the ground. “Feather Touch will destroy you all!”.

The groups grew larger and more specialized and when everyone had set up for the fight, I realized I should get involved.

I came crashing through the ceiling with a mighty afro hair style–somewhat mangled from going through the ceiling. I looked like I put my finger in a light socket. “Wild Hair Style!”

Everyone began and somehow I managed to get through the mass unscathed.

An earthquake suddenly hit and I was the only one left on the bottom floor. Someone said falling through the ceiling was a good approach to death at this point because if you died outside you would have no chance at eternal life. We were somehow all evil but forgiven if having died in a church. I decided to go outside.

Hills shook and people lost balance but the quake subsided fairly quickly.

There’s much more but I can’t spend all day writing. I’ve got some errands to run. Maybe later I’ll finish up the story. Here are some reminder notes:

Police force, tapping phone lines. The mole. The secretary with a secret crush. Spearmint posing as peppermint but calling himself outright the “Kandy Kid”.

So, I was late for class and I was supposed to immediately get the principal to notify my instructor before I set foot in the classroom. This was a strange university, I thought–I was only 8 minutes late. I lied to the principal, telling him I was a whole 5 minutes late and I thought the instructor would put me in a box. The principal looked concerned for my well being. He was a ragged man, appearing almost as a vagrant on the steps in one of the hallways. He ushered me to sit and told me to write a page about why I was late while he went to make excuses for me. I agreed and wrote about missing the bus. While writing, I reflected on what really happened.

I was staying over at someone’s house, someone I didn’t know. We needed supplies for a full night of no sleep. We couldn’t sleep. We needed to fight off death. One of them had a special incantation for permanently warding off death but it involved never eating again for the rest of your life (which would be a long time). So we needed to go to the supermarket and buy munchies. We were going to enjoy our last meals.

At the supermarket, there were thousands of people. It was like everyone wanted to have a last meal at once. There was an old woman about to eat a cracker at a sample station and I recognized her as being a past recipient of the death-ward. I tried to warn her that a cracker was not worth her life, but death swiveled through the biomass and aged her into extinction before I could even reach shouting distance.

I was in a bank talking to an acquaintance of mine, a hacker that I had only met briefly at some convention or party. Somehow the topic of Python (the programming language) came up. I told him that I was intending to learn it since everyone I knew said it was the greatest thing since sliced perl modules. He disagreed:

“Python isn’t that great. I took 3 undergrad classes on it.”

“You never found a use for it?” I queried.

“Well, the blood key is a bit slow, you know. You should see the rendering, it’s just not that great.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant but I knew I needed to get back to class. I had a betrayal to enact and I needed to do it soon or it would be too late.

In the class room, we all sat in a circle on the floor. Everyone was either drugged up or spiritually hallucinating–unless there really was a holographic head sitting next to me. Everyone acted like zombies anyway–except for the Head, which was strangely coherent and commanding. It was the Head I was to betray.

There was a game of sorts for which I was supposed to have a correct number of chits. Part of my subversive plan was that I had a pocket full of chits. I had all of them in fact. I laid out 24 of them and the Head looked around the room as people fished for theirs. He came back to me and began counting my chits.

“You don’t have enough…”

In my frantic worry about pulling off my plan, I had forgotten how many chits I was supposed to have. I needed to add more but not too many. I couldn’t reveal that I had so many in my pocket. I pulled out one and I could hear the clicking of the chit horde mixing in my pocket. Worried that someone else would hear, I pulled out a handful of chit parts. I had halves and quarters, thirds and bits. It was chaos. The Head freaked but it was too late. I had delivered my message clear and his downfall was imminent. *that part didn’t make sense to me in the dream or in real life but it worked*

I’m going to make a real effort to document my dreams again. I was reviewing my ancient online journal (from the days before I started using a real blogging system) and found a couple of dreams that I remember so vividly. Here’s one from October 14, 2004: