One of my favorite ties.

I heartily approve of this tie! And Matilda totally looks like your sister!

I only got half of the spelling right!

I heartily approve of this tie!

It's Frank Lloyd Wright!

And Matilda totally looks like your sister!

My sister and my grandma were both very pretty so this could turn out okay.

I think I just had a geekgasm here....

New Form of "Mobius" Carbon Predicted

"We've seen carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and chickenwire. Now materials scientists have created a computer model of a Mobius strip fashioned from strips of graphene — a molecule that would have a single surface and only one edge. (Other groups have made Mobius-like organic molecules but never out of carbon sheets.) The model allows the researchers to determine the physical and chemical properties of the molecules and how these depend on the number of twists in the strip. The team say, for example, that 'Mobius carbon' should be stable to temperatures of at least 500 Kelvin (abstract). But the most exciting prediction is that strips with an odd number of half twists should have a dipole moment that would cause them to self-organize into a crystal. That implies that there's a new type of carbon made entirely of Mobius strips ready to be made by any chemists with a good supply of graphene (maybe these guys)."

DVR alert: Neil Gaiman is Stephen Colbert's guest tonight, if anyone wants to record the rerun.

Ye gads, I'm so friggin' tired.

So the NYT article explained it for me, which helps, but oh the irony! When actually playing the game I seemed to have picked the car the first time roughly 3/4 of the time, so I was losing like crazy with their strategy.

Wow. I was really appallingly bad at that spelling test. I would tell you how I feel about that, but I can't spell the word. Hint: it ends in "ass."

And those words are in my brane. I could take that test again right now, having looked at the results, and I would still get a good number of them wrong. It looks right once it's written out like that! I dither, and I decide wrong.

Thank goodness firefox corrects all my spelling on the fly. fex, it says I have spelled brane, firefox and fex wrong. Helpful.

What else? I had something in my buffer. What was it? Oh, yes.

Some people are concerned at how easy it is for someone to read your passport's RFID data.

And credit cards!

RFID made you all zombies. Fortunately, you can buy these awesome RFID blocking wallets from Magellan's, so all is well and you needn't succumb to the mark of the beast.

I can't remember how to get into my old Flickr account, so I have to reload all my pictures and rename everything under my new account, which really sucks. I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend! (Well, in addition to spending Sunday with Dad, who's hanging out up here and taking me out to dinner for my birthday next week.)

I did get a few new pics of my cat Amarna up, though!

Her best pose

Her more typical pose

Green eyes.

Her dangle look

I understand that with the passports, at least, you can "accidentally" step on them a couple of times and then the RFID mysteriously stops working, and the authorities have to handle them like any old passport... which there are so many of....

I have a 6 mo. check up today that I'd like to be as uneventful as possible. So, some, no lumps or bumps thoughts please.