Owner: Every Topic in the Universe(s?) URL:http://omniverse.blogspot.com/ Join Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:45:45 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: "Science, the unknown, and the human race... and how it might all be connected."
That sums it up so well that it's hard to come up with more when required... er... well, just click and you'll see, lol. Site statistics:Click here
The karma of rescuing 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Last Saturday, I heard a BANG on the kitchen window; despite my having hung so many suncatchers on it that it barely lets in any light, the birds still fly into the bare spots pretty frequently, so this didn't alarm me at 1st... until I looked up from the computer to see a little tweetie lying motionless on the air conditioner. I lunged to the sliding glass door to see if he was moving; usually they're just stunned and fly away after a few minutes, but sometimes they don't recover before it gets dark and have to be put up in a tree so they don't spend the night on the ground (at least until the cats show up). This bird did something I'd never seen before; he slowly rolled over onto his back with his feet in the air. Shrieking in dismay, and ignoring my husband's admonition that he was a goner, I yanked open the door, dashed out and tenderly scooped the tweet up; I saw no injuries or blood, neither his head nor his wings were at funny angles, and his eyes were open and bli Read more:karma
, rescuing
Blogger got me!! AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!It was 3AM, and I'd just finished watching "Metal Mania" on VH1 Classic. I was wearily doing my last check of stuff on the laptop before going to bed, and a minute adjustment to my template occurred to me; being far too anal to put it off until the next day, I went to my Blogger
account... and was forwarded to a page that informed me that I had to migrate to the new Blogger. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! I tried every link I had, every way I could think of, to get around it and into my account, but every one of them forwarded me to that same implacable page.It was 3AM, and I was suddenly wide awake. Remembering all the horror stories I'd read from people who'd switched to the allegedly-no-longer-beta Blogger: The 8-10 hours of inaccessibility while the transfer took place. The destruction of template customizations and archives. The inability to put things in the sidebar. Blogs locking their owners out or just plain vanis
Mating, $ and mass 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!(Note to those who read me on Bloglines: They're having some sort of problem with my RSS feed, and are having trouble figuring it out; if you want to be able to read me on a feed reader while I battle Bloglines, click on the "Add to Any" button in my sidebar and choose from dozens of different ones that CAN get my feed right.)In the February 2007 issue of Discover magazine, there's a blurb in the article "The Big Bang Machine" that says (asterisks are mine):"All matter is made of quarks... Every proton and neutron is made of three quarks. But all three quarks together account for less than 2 percent of the total mass of any proton or neutron. So where does the rest of the mass come from? Physicists ***theorize**** that each quark in every atomic nucleus is surrounded by countless 'virtual particles' that constantly emerge from the vacuum and then almost instantaneously subside into nothingness again. It is these eva Read more:Mating
Borrowing a pen = friendship and sexual attraction? 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!(Did you notice the nifty "animation" I've installed in my title bar (BlogMad visitors will have to open my blog in a new window to see it)? Cool, huh?)When I was in 2nd grade, my mother found out that I'd loaned someone a pencil or given them a sheet of paper (I can no longer recall which), and astonished me by raving on and on about how evil this was; everyone ELSE passed pencils and paper around, so why was it wrong for ME to do so? She told me that paper and pencils were very expensive, and this was why I wasn't allowed, it turns out, to give or loan such things; she instructed me that from then on, whenever I was asked for any of my school supplies, I was to reply "My mommy paid for that, and your mommy is supposed to pay for your paper/pencils, not my mommy, so you tell your mommy to buy what you need for school, because my mommy won't pay for your paper/pencils." Yes, my mother was THAT twisted; you can imagin Read more:Borrowing
Husband "humor" 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!(In quotes because, as any wife could tell you, it's not like normal humor-it's either puerile or gross or both... don't say I didn't warn you.)My part of the city has recently been inundated with Vietnamese restaurants, and they all have "Pho" in their names, which I was disappointed to learn meant that they mostly had soup, which I don't care for; my husband, although also un-thrilled about the avalanche of soup places, had too much fun with the word "pho" to care. The correct pronunciation of "pho" is "fuh" (or more like "fuh?" because it's "tonal"), but it LOOKS like it should be pronounced "foh," and that's how we said it amongst ourselves before I looked it up; you should pretend it's pronounced that way for the duration of this story, so that it'll all make sense... because, like most men, my husband has a passion for puns, the stinkier the better, and thus he came up with:Him: Do you know what they call Read more:Husband
The Beware List, Part 7 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!The Beware
List is an accumulation of red flags that I've noticed will very consistently indicate if a person is evil, a psycho, sociopath, manipulator, clueless depressive, or screwing you (or planning to); if you notice someone's behavior matching a description from the list, be on high alert and start taking precautionary measures (which often means just kicking them to the curb as they so richly deserve). This post contains the latest installment; to read entries 1-60, see my posts of 5-31-06, 7-6-06, 8-31-06, 10-6-06, 11-19-06 and 1-10-07. Beware of anyone who:61) Wants to discuss their problems with you, but insists that certain portions of the topic are off-limits, prevents you from making certain sorts of comments, or in any way makes you feel like you’re walking through a minefield when you’re trying to HELP.This person has no desire to SOLVE their problems, and if you try to make them they'll turn on you l
How to never be wrong 2007-03-02 23:46:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!I learned this skill the hard way; I came from an abusive family where wrongness was seen as incontrovertible proof of moral failing and absolute worthlessness, so I figured out at an early age how to stop being wrong in self-defense. Don't worry, it's easier than it looks; heck, 95% of wrongness can be eliminated by just following the 1st rule:1) If you don't know anything about a topic, DONT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT.We have such an intense desire to be seen as one of the group that when the conversation switches to something we know nothing about we have the overwhelming urge to keep babbling; this goes x10 if someone asks us directly about it and suddenly we're in the spotlight. If you try to say something that sounds like what the others have said, or that you THINK is somehow related to the topic, you've got a reasonable chance of getting away with it, which is why everyone does it... but every time you do it yo
Harry Potter's penis and other odd bits 2007-03-07 11:03:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!While surfing blogs last week, I came across a photo of a cute naked guy leaning up against a horse; you see porn pics all the time online, and normally I ignore them, but my attention was caught because the central element of the pic was uncircumcised, which as an American woman I'm not used to. My "What the heck is THAT? Oh, yeah, right" reaction gave me time to see the accompanying text... claiming that the photo was of Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays HarryPotter
. He looks so different with his hair shorter and bangs-free that I hadn't recognized him, but a closer look verified that the face WAS his... what about the body, though? The post said that he's currently starring in the play "Equus" in London, and that, as required by the role, he appears nude in one scene; a little research verified that this was indeed the case (not having been born yesterday, I don't automatically believe what I read on blogs
What makes a person "good"? 2005-10-19 11:46:00 Three days ago, I posted the following:"how can we truly have 'good' if we don't have 'evil' against which it battles? And if there's no actual good and evil... then what?"Since then, I've mulled it over alot, and part of what I've come up with is that it's HARD to give a definition of a "good" person
that stands up to merciless argument.Let's start out with the idea, held by pretty much everyone, that an animal can't be morally good or bad/evil because it's not making choices as to its actions with an awareness of right and wrong; it seems reasonable to me to get from this concept that whatever animals DO can't be morally good or bad, and thus that anything that could be seen as a natural animal behavior couldn't be counted for or against the most advanced animal, US, from a moral standpoint. I know, we supposedly civilized people have decided that many natural behaviors are immoral and bad, but I'll save that for a post on what's wrong/bad; figuring out what's "go Read more:makes
What do we mean when we say someone's "nice"? 2007-03-11 11:46:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!John might be a liar, always keep people waiting, tell ugly racial jokes, cheat on his girlfriends, and shoplift the occasional candy bar, but if you ask anyone who knows him, and knows he does those things, what he's like, they'll say, "He's nice." Heck, John could be a serial killer, and when they interviewed the people in his life after his arrest, and asked them what sort of person he was, they'd STILL say "He was nice"; haven't you seen folks do just that a hundred times?We call virtually everyone who doesn't perform anti-social acts on US, or on others right in front of us, "nice"; what does calling someone "nice" MEAN, then? We pretend that it means what it's SUPPOSED TO, that the person thus labeled is almost always kind, considerate, etc, but what it ACTUALLY means in most cases is:1) I love/like them (and if you think that everyone YOU care about is nice, you're either applying unusually stringent guidel
Should we bring back the draft? 2007-03-15 09:08:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!If you watched "60 Minutes" on Sunday, you heard Andy Rooney say something that's undoubtedly brought him a ton of abuse; that, although he never thought he'd be saying it, since in order to fill our quotas for new troops we're having to "lower the bar" and accept those with criminal records or without high school degrees, we should bring back the draft in order to have a higher quality of soldier. He based this opinion on his own military service, and his bad memories of men of these "lower types" who served beside and even over him; he considered them to be poor soldiers and even poorer examples of Americans for foreigners to base their ideas of what we're like on. Should American military personnel provide a positive example of what Americans are like? Ideally, yes, of course, and many of them DO, but that's not part of their job description; their job is to kill people and destroy things, not to be masters of et
Does intelligence work against happiness? 2007-03-19 09:45:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!Thanks to my friend Peety, whose highly entertaining blog is herehttp://peety-passion.com/I found a fascinating article by sociologist Bill Allin called "Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy," which begins with a thought-provoking quote:"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."- Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)If you're puzzled as to how this could be, you haven't been paying attention; despite the lip service we give to how swell intelligence
is, intelligent people are generally disliked and distrusted in our culture, and it's perfectly logical that they'd be less happy than average as a result. We hold intelligence in such contempt that even in the job world, where it should be eagerly embraced for its potential to make $, bright folks are often screwed:"Western society is not set up to nurture intelligent children and adults, the way it dotes over athletes an Read more:against
, happiness
Evil vs crazy 2007-03-23 12:23:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!There's a series on the Discovery Times channel (I don't know what that name means either) called "Most Evil"http://times.discovery.com/tvlistings/series.jsp?series=25220&gid=0&channel=DTCLast night, I stumbled across an episode of the series called "Psychotic Killers," and learned of the horrific actions of some of our nation's most revolting murderers; I also learned that even indulging in the most nauseating behaviors imaginable did NOT guarantee that they'd be labeled insane. The most disturbing example was the case of Gary M. Heidnik, who kidnapped a half dozen women and held them prisoner in his basement; in addition to the standard physical and sexual abuse that a violent criminal would be expected to inflict upon captives, Heidnik added some sick twists... such as putting the flesh of one of the women who died under his abuse through a blender, mixing it with dog food and making the other women eat it. Is this
What makes us search for meaning? 2007-03-27 11:08:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!Quick note: After 3 years of having the Babel Fish translator on my site, I've switched to a new one; it's that big purple thing in the sidebar. I chose it because it has 10 languages instead of 8, allows you to choose format and color, and has a more compact design; if you want it, and you really SHOULD have a translator to assist foreign visitors, you can get it here:http://www.appliedlanguage.com/trans/free_quick.aspxScott Adams made an intriguing point on his blog:"When you serve a purpose larger than yourself, you experience the sensation of having meaning. There are plenty of larger purposes from which to choose: You can save the whales, feed the poor, shelter the homeless, march for peace, serve your notion of God, whatever. The details don't matter.If your reaction to my explanation of larger purposes was 'none of that sounds interesting to me,' then you haven't finished fixing yourself. When you do, you will Read more:makes
Odd critter behavior 2007-03-31 09:32:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!We have several skunks that visit our patio to eat astonishing amounts of kibble every night. A couple of months ago, I put out the bones left over from our ribs dinner so that they could, in theory, gnaw the scraps off of them; although they'd sadly shown no shred of interest in the rats and mice that swarm our yard, in the wild they DO hunt various little vermins and so might be expected to enjoy some meat. When the 1st skunk started eagerly tearing meat off a rib, we beamed happily; things turned unexpectedly exciting when the usually mannerly little mammal shook the bone, pounced on it, and began dragging it vigorously around... some of those bones got hauled 20 feet, completely out of the yard!! It turned out that all the skunks did that with the bones, which was interesting because it's not like they often pull down a COW in the wild and so would have an instinctive way of handling its parts. It's hilarious to
Live each day as if it were your last... yeah, right 2007-04-04 10:11:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!Sounds like a wonderful bit of advice, with the subtext that it'll allow you to make the most out of life... but will it?If you knew that tomorrow would be your final day: Would you go to work and/or school? Would you exercise or take any other health-enhancing measures such as stress reduction or consuming nutritional supplements? Would you make, or go to, any doctor or dentist appointments? What kinds of food wold you eat, and in what quantities? Would you bother showering, brushing or flossing? Would you do any housecleaning or yard maintenance? If you had sex, would you use contraception or worry about safer sex? If there was someone hot you've wanted to sleep with who was willing, but you'd held back because at least one of you wasn't single, would you go for it? Would you waste time picking up your dry cleaning or running other errands? Would you shave, trim your toenails, or do anything else that'd essen
The most delicious chips EVER... and the sweetest otters 2007-04-08 09:35:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!I had a really good coupon for the new Pringles Select chips, which are gourmet-style snacks in a bag rather than the can-o-chips Pringles is associated with; 3 of the 4 available flavors (Parmesan Garlic, Sun Dried Tomato and Cinnamon SweetPotato) didn't have a chance of tasting good to me, but, as a lover of Chinese food, including moderately hot stuff (and how hot could a mainstream chip be, after all?), I figured that the Szechuan Barbecue flavor had a good chance of being enjoyable. I got them, tried them, and...YUM YUM YUM YUM YUM YUM YUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!They're so good that I, with my will of steel where food consumption is concerned, could barely stop eating them. So good that my husband, after just ONE chip, warned me that I needed to hide the bag, half-joked that he'd be buying more bags that I'd never see, and asked if we could have a MEAL built around them (which we will-we'll have hamburger patties to prov
The Beware List, Part 8 2007-04-12 10:40:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!The Beware
List represents my lifetime experience of how people behave if they're evil, sociopathic, manipulators or major depressives, especially when they're about to screw you; folks like these follow very consistent patterns, so if you pay attention, and don't discount the warnings out of misguided loyalty, you can stop them cold. This post contains the latest installment of the list; to read entries 1-70, see my posts of 5-31-06, 7-6-06, 8-31-06, 10-6-06, 11-19-06, 1-10-07 and 2-27-07. Beware of anyone who:71) Has no problems with someone being attacked, but cries “foul” if the victim fights back, especially if they outfight the attacker.This is a sure sign of someone who doesn’t hesitate to attack and feels entitled to get away with it; only chronic evildoers think that evil behavior is ok, and only the scariest sociopathic ones object to victims fighting in their own defense.72) Expresses intolerance and
Fun with freebies 2007-04-16 10:06:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!If you're still struggling to get your taxes done, this one's for you; if you didn't earn over $52K last year, you can get "free federal online tax preparation" and access to free electronic tax return filing via the IRS website:http://www.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsphttp://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.htmlSeveral years ago, I went through a period of signing up for tons of freebies and samples online; even then there were forums dedicated to getting free stuff, so all I had to do was click links and fill in my info on the requisite websites. Most of what I got was those little packets of lotion and shampoo, but I got some bigger stuff too: I especially remember a large bag of hard candy from Sweet'N Low (for my husband, who loves saccharine), and, the all-time champion sample, several styrofoam bowls filled with cereal that I'd "designed" with my choice of ingredients from a lengthy menu of options
Financial institutions f*ck up 2007-04-20 09:37:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!We put a great deal of trust in our financial institutions; we have to, because with the exception of a few holdouts who still keep their $ in their mattresses we've all handed over our entire accumulated funds to them. The gov't is aware of this, which is why so many laws apply to such companies... except for PayPal (which acts as a bank but isn't regulated like one), but that's a whole 'nother essay. The companies themselves are aware of the importance of dotting every "i" and crossing every "t," and so go to great lengths to perform each function in a proper manner... usually. Their failures, therefore, are particularly dismaying. I've got 2 such issues currently in progress:I belong to a military credit union, a holdover from when I was a military dependent; this is mostly a good thing, as it provides even more benefits than a regular credit union, 1 of which is that I've had a free credit card from them for Read more:Financial
Omni's semi-recipes 2007-04-24 09:32:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!I can't just call them "recipes" because they're only partial ideas about how food can be put together to taste good; I don't cook, but as a supertaster (see my post of 3-5-04) trying to find ways to eat in a culinary landscape designed for tasters and non-tasters I've given alot of thought to food and how it can be combined in palatable, convenient ways, and this is what I've come up with:1) The glory of Monterey jack, especially pepper jack (which is just a LITTLE hot, so don't be afraid to try it):a) Mozzarella goes bad quickly, and isn't actually that good; instead, use jack cheese, which looks the same, has the same consistency, but lasts longer and tastes MUCH better, on Italian dishes (including pizza).b) Instead of using only Cheddar cheese with Mexican dishes (how did we Americans get used to doing that-it's not like this British cheese is authentic on Mexican food), omelettes, mashed potatoes, etc, mix i
How much are your bookmarks worth? 2007-04-28 09:09:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!Think about it: If you've been online for any length of time, you probably have THOUSANDS of bookmarks, many of them for sites that'd be time-consuming to locate via a search engine, especially if they aren't high-ranked... and that's assuming that you remember every site you've bookmarked, and that each one has either a distinctive name or unusual keywords to give you any sort of chance of pinpointing it amongst what're probably a million similar sites. This means that if you lost all your bookmarks, by which I mean ALL versions, forms, copies, backups and files of bookmarks from every computer you use, some of those sites would only be recoverable with a great deal of time and effort, possibly more than you'd ever be able to make, some you'd never find again, and probably MOST you'd have no specific memory of and thus have no way to look for; what would that mean to you? Take a minute and look at your bookmarks
Is testosterone one of the causes of evil? 2007-05-02 10:17:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!No, this isn't a man-bashing post; it's about people with higher-than-average levels of testosterone
for their gender. With that said; we take it so for granted that the overwhelming majority of crimes, especially violent ones, are committed by MEN that we don't wonder WHY... all *I* ever thought about it was that testosterone often leads to aggression, and aggression can be the root of criminal behavior, but that's clearly not a sufficient explanation. If testosterone is part of what creates, not just aggression, but EVIL, that'd explain alot; here's the 1st hint that this could be so (asterisks mine):"Most people don't appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that ***some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.***'It's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal Read more:causes
Do you think for yourself? 2007-05-06 10:56:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!Ok, now ask yourself that question again and really think
about the answer. Still sure you're a rugged individualist?Do you have the same political beliefs as your parents? Or the exact opposite ones? Or ones that match the views you encountered in college? Or the same ones as your romantic partner or social group? If you answered "yes" to any of those, and you didn't do an in-depth objective analysis the conclusions of which coincidentally fell into one of those categories, you're not thinking for yourself.Do you have the same religious beliefs as your parents? If you said "yes," unless the reason for it is that your deity appeared to you and confirmed that you'd picked the one true religion, you're not thinking for yourself.If asked your opinion on an issue, does your reply parallel what you read or heard from the media, or, worse, on a blog? Unless you did independent fact-checking and, again, in-depth analysis,
Husband humor 2007-05-10 11:46:00 Click here to register for the top-secret new blog service!!First, a quick announcement: If you look at the "subscription area" in my sidebar you'll see that I've added a new option, "+ Bookmark"; if you click it, you'll get a window that'll allow you to add my blog to your bookmarking services, not just Del.icio.us and Digg but a bunch of others too, 33 total as of when I write this. The site that provides this service, Addthis.com, also offers a similar service for feed readers, but it doesn't have nearly as many options as offered by Addtoany.com (my yellow "subscription button"), so I didn't take advantage of it; it's worth keeping an eye on, though, as it'll make for a nicer-looking display to have both buttons be from the same site, and they may catch up eventually. Husband
s generally do things that wives don't like; that's a given. MY husband really pushes the envelope, though: A prime example is his insistence that if he lays down on the floor with his eyes sh
Medical surprises from Discover 2005-06-14 11:59:00 You've probably read many times that there's no such thing as an aphrodisiac, that people who think that consuming a given thing boosts their libidos are just experiencing the placebo effect or wishful thinking, that all the things that people have believed for centuries were having an effect were just the result of thousands of people fooling themselves... and now, from the June 2005 issue of Discover
, page 11, comes the following:"Oysters do boost the libido, say U.S. and Italian chemists. They find the shellfish are rich in rare amino acids that, especially when eaten raw, trigger an increase in sex hormones."Just watch, it's only a matter of time before other supposed aphrodisiacs are also found to contain something that boosts libido; this is yet another case of the arrogance of scientists who figure that if they haven't found proof that something works yet, it in fact doesn't work, no matter how many people say otherwise from personal experience.The BIG surprise in this is
Awesome URL's 2007-05-14 10:54:00 In today's "Foxtrot" comic striphttp://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2007/05/13/the "average" kids get promised rewards for straight A's, but the smart kid doesn't get offered anything because he ALREADY gets straight A's; kudos to cartoonist Bill Amend for making the long overdue point that, while it's fine to reward kids for better-than-usual performance, kids that perform well all the time should get something for it every so often too... even, dare I say it, MORE often than the kids who perform less well.Those of you that're constantly changing your layouts will love this one:http://colorpicker.info/The topmost picker (there are some other useful ones on the page as well) allows you to select any color and get multiple colors that go perfectly with it, whether you want similar colors or wildly contrasting ones; there are controls (nearly every part of the display is clickable) that allow you to alter aspects of the colors to get you to the desired shades(s)... you can even ch
What is reality, really? 2007-05-18 12:56:00 You know what reality
is, right? Or do you? We define reality, in the strictest sense, as what we and the instruments we've designed can perceive; the problem with that is that neither our senses nor our instruments are designed to perceive reality as a whole... all we can get are bits and pieces.We think our 5 senses are wonderful, but looked at objectively there's not much to them: We can perceive light and sound, but only within certain ranges. We can distinguish some sorts of chemicals via smell and taste, but far from all. Our sense of touch tells us about what we're in contact with (down to a certain level) and temperature. And that's IT; our bodies have no ability to detect any of the other aspects of reality, whether it's commonplace stuff like microwaves, esoteric stuff like the parallel universes predicted by string theory, or anything in the spiritual realm. Even within the zone of what we CAN detect, we're no great shakes; countless lower animals have far sh
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