Yesterday, I discovered this cool little game from an independent manufacturer. http://www.thepowerofpaint.com/.

It's a first-person shooter puzzle game, a lot like Portal. However, instead of portals, you use paint to get around levels. There are three paint colours: green, red, and blue. Green makes you jump, red makes you move faster, and blue lets you stick to surfaces.

You are given a paint gun that lets you colour the walls and floors, and the game makes you use the three colours in concert to solve the puzzles. It's not a very long game, nor does it have mind-blowing graphics, but I found it tremendously entertaining. Except maybe for those parts where you have to crawl on ceilings to get places. I felt a bit ill after that.

Given that it is a project made by game design students, I don't think that it's going to be spruced up and released into the market anytime soon. Although if they did decide to commercialise this, those guys are going to be rich.

I wonder if I can buy Portal, separate from the rest of The Orange Box.

Q: What what's red and smells like blue paint?

A: Red paint.


Recently, I've been reading up on homeopathy. Homeopathy is the practice of heavily diluting a substance believed to have curative effects, and having the effects still present in the solvent(usually water or alcohol). It is also based on the "like cures like" principle, where the substance that causes ill effects can be made to cure them when diluted properly.

Apparently, heavily diluting snake venom makes a snakebite cure.

Homeopathy is not to be confused with herbal remedies, like... well, herbs.

What astonishes me is the number of people who believe in and subscribe to homeopathic therapies. According to practitioners, the "active" ingredient somehow "imprints" itself onto water, such that the water is altered even when the amount of ingredient remaining is effectively zero. This simply makes no sense. For one, the relation between dosage and effect as demonstrated by regular medical practice is entirely thrown out of the window here.

Secondly, water molecules can't have their "vibration states"(this is what they call it, seriously) possibly altered by such minute concentrations of solute, and no amount of manual shaking and stirring is going to do anything special.

Besides, the entire principle of homeopathy seems to overlook something: Water molecules are fungible. In every glass of water you drink, there is a strong likelihood that at least one of the molecules in there has passed through the gut of Benjamin Franklin. Almost all of the water that you drink has at one point been in the ocean, inside organisms, in sewage systems, in the air... If water really retained any sort of property simply by being in contact with another substance, then every drop of tap water is a homeopathic remedy to everything.


Also, how do you pronounce "fungible"? What sound does the G make?

-Joe

My writing has been way off for a really long time now. I haven't even tried to stay focused on one topic since those essay questions during the exams... But they don't count. I was writing for a grade then. It's probably all for nothing anyway. I doubt I'll get the top scorer award in microbiology.

So, recently I've been pretty bored. I picked up The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series -all five books- from the school library. A pleasant surprise, really. I had no idea that they had it there. I've been reading it on and off. Somehow, I'm just not that into reading any more. My eyes start to burn after a while and I need to take short breaks.

I also finally printed the music sheet for The Carnival of Venice that I got from Shaun. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the wrong variation. There's one by a guy named J.B. Arban, and there's another by Herbert L. Clarke. I much prefer Clarke's version, mainly because I can actually play it somewhat, but also that it sounds less "show-offy" and more like an actual solo.


In other news, my table has been invaded by Pharaoh ants... I think. Well, they certainly fit the description: small, black and goddamn annoying. Which is strange, really, since I haven't eaten anything up here for more than a month now. It's like the ants just suddenly stumbled across a few microscopic potato chip fragments and decided that there would be more. And so here they are, crawling around in that sick, sick manner that small black ants do. Watching a spider move is fun. Watching these midgets of the arthropod world mess around on my desk... very unfun.

Worst of all, I can't find any trail to follow. All I see is a few stray ants crawling over the wooden expanse. I've been squishing them, wiping my table down with isopropanol... but an hour later, I detect motion out of the corner of my eye. Augh. Sometimes, they'll get onto my arms and bite me at crucial moments, such as when I'm trying to execute a complicated coordinated assault on terrorist facilities. It doesn't hurt that much, but hell, seriously annoying.


I've read a little bit about Pharaoh ants. It turns out that they were initially indigenous to Indonesia and West Africa. But then, they hitched rides on boats and things and ended up pretty much all over the world. Kind of like rats, except that those things came from China. And are pretty big, so you can pretend to be Steve Irwin when you catch and kill them.

The black ants can have massive colonies, composed of multiple nests and multiple egg-laying queens. Adding to this freakish display of reproduction, they also produce individuals capable of sexual reproduction, unlike other ants. They're the sort of animal that all other animals want to kill.

Interestingly, instead of releasing evil queens-to-bes and drones when expanding, they "bud off". A queen(one of the many) among a small number of worker ants leave the colony, carrying immature larvae and eggs to another site to set up a new colony. I find this really fascinating, because this is just like fungi seeding. You cut off a piece of mold and put it somewhere else, and you get more mold. Ants have been recognised as superorganisms for quite some time now, but this budding thing is just a small step away from turning Pharaoh ants into real-life monsters.

(Plus they also have been known to eat shoe polish. It's like an unstoppable army of expendable cockroaches.)

I'm going for the insecticide.

-Joe

Oh oh and I'm going to get faster internet! WHOOOO

Mm. Hm. It's been quite a while now.

I just feel like complaining about something that doesn't concern me in the slightest. If the globe continues to warm up at its current rate, in twenty years time the only polar bears we will see will be living in zoos. In other words, nothing will change.

Every year, thousands of Canadians and a variety of people from the northern Europe traipse up to the icy sheets and hunt seals. In my mind, they all wear T-shirts with "Club Baby Seals" and a cute sea puppy emblazoned on them. They kill seals for meat, blubber, and their pelts, because apparently seal fur is a nice material. This doesn't really bother me. What bothers me is the thousands of other people who take offense to seal clubbing for some reason.

They're mainly in the animal rights activist category. A number of them are fanatical vegans, who are at least consistent in their beliefs. However, the rest of them are just mindless drones who have had their emotions played upon by the vegans. It also helps that seals are generally considered adorable little critters. Show them a few pictures of those furry torpedoes having their skulls bashed in and they cry bloody murder.

Seals are wild animals. Before the advent of farming, humans ate wild animals. After farming was invented, we still ate animals. The only reason that people get so worked up about seal clubbing is that seals look nice. Sealing does not endanger the species. In fact, the most sought-after variety is still standing strong with a population three times that of most other seals.


I'll bet that if seals were giant arthropods with chitinous exoskeletons, no one would even care how many of them are killed. In fact, there'd probably be entire organisations promoting the extermination of such a hideous species. Meanwhile, I would be torn between suggesting awesome ways to kill these things, and trying to save them because a terrestrial arthropod the size of a dog would be pretty awesome.

Either way, I think that the people concerned in these battles are just getting a little too into it. Will it really matter if the seal population drops slightly? Will it really matter if another baby panda is born? Sure, each and every living creature is an expression of complexity, and the wonders of evolution, but the loss of one species allows another species to take its place. Things change. Great things can happen. I'm not sure what I'm saying now. I need to lie down.


I guess what I'd really like would be a way to preserve the genetic information for each and every species. That way, we could populate a habitat, Jurassic Park style. In the distant future, it would be like an extremely intricate form of gardening. Grow an ecosystem from a variety of flora and fauna. It would require intelligence, finesse, and a deep understanding of ecology. It would be Spore, but in real life.

I hope synthetic organs become a reality within my lifetime. I want to see the future.

-Joe